User:Iseult/Quotations
"There is not love of life without despair about life." —Albert Camus
“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.” ― Albert Camus, Neither Victims Nor Executioners
“C'est cela l'amour, tout donner, tout sacrifier sans espoir de retour. [That is love; to give away everything, to sacrifice everything, without the slightest desire to get anything in return.]” —Albert Camus, Les Justes
“Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else's blood. This is why our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.” ― Albert Camus
"In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger—something better, pushing right back." — Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays (1968) trans. Nathan Scott
cf.
“O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.” — Albert Camus, Return to Tipasa
"Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas regumque turres. [Pale Death, with impartial step, knocks at the cottages of the poor and the palaces of kings.]" —Horace, Odes I, IV 13-14
"Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me; not [only] of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in [the same] intelligence and [the same] portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another, then, is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away." —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2:1
"Since it is possible that you may depart from life this very moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly." —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2:11
“How quickly all things disappear,—in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them.” —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2:12
“Though thou shouldest be going to live three thousand years and as many times ten thousand years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses. The longest and shortest are thus brought to the same. For the present is the same to all, though that which perish is not the same; and so that which is lost appears to be a mere moment. For a man cannot lose either the past or the future: for what a man has not, how can any one take this from him? These two things then thou must bear in mind; the one, that all things from eternity are of like forms and come round in a circle, and that it makes no difference whether a man shall see the same things during a hundred years, or two hundred, or an infinite time; and the second, that the longest liver and he who will die soonest lose just the same. For the present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived, if it is true that this is the only thing which he has, and that a man cannot lose a thing if he has it not.” —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2:14
'Avenge yourself on your enemies by not becoming like them.' —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
"But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?" —Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people...In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?" —Richard Dawkins
“You’re laughing. When you laugh, I want to transform the entire world so it will mirror you.” —Vladimir Nabokov, Gods
“Listen—I want to run all my life, screaming at the top of my lungs. Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator.
Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the scream, exhale, release life’s rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life.” —Vladimir Nabokov, Gods
“Forgive me if I am incapable of weeping, of simple human weeping, but instead keep singing and running somewhere, clutching at whatever wings fly past, tall, disheveled, with a wave of suntan on my forehead. Forgive me. That’s how it must be.” —Vladimir Nabokov, Gods
“I sit alone on the sparse grass. A short way off there is a vegetable garden with some purple cabbage. Beyond the vacant lot, factory buildings, buoyant brick behemoths, float in the azure mist. At my feet, a squashed tin glints rustily inside a funnel of sand. Around me, silence and a kind of spring emptiness. There is no death. The wind comes tumbling upon me from behind like a limp doll and tickles my neck with its downy paw. There can be no death.” —Vladimir Nabokov, Gods
“She might be a little introverted, livelier of movement than of conversation, neither bashful nor forward, with a soul that seemed submerged, but in a radiant moistness. Opalescent on the surface but translucent in her depths…” ―Vladimir Nabokov, The Enchanter
“Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words.” ―Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
“One was the common one with writers of his type: the bridging of the abyss lying between expression and thought; the maddening feeling that the right words, the only words are awaiting you on the opposite bank in the misty distance, and the shudderings of the still unclothed thought clamouring for them on this side of the abyss.” ―Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
"The force and originality involved in the primary spasm of inspiration is directly proportional to the worth of the book the author will write. At the bottom of the scale a very mild kind of thrill can be experienced by a minor writer, noticing, say, the inner connection between a smoking factory chimney, a stunted lilac bush in the yard, and a pale-faced child; but the combination is so simple, the threefold symbol so obvious, the bridge between the images so well-worn by the feet of literary pilgrims and by cartloads of standard ideas, and the world deduced so very like the average one, that the work of fiction set into motion will be necessarily of modest worth.
On the other hand, I would not like to suggest that the initial urge with great writing is always the product of something seen or heard or smelt or tasted or touched during a long-haired art-for-artist's aimless rambles.
Although to develop in one's self the art of forming sudden harmonious patterns out of widely separate threads is never to be despised, and although, as in Marcel Proust's case, the actual idea of a novel may spring from such actual sensations as the melting of a biscuit on the tongue or the roughness of a pavement underfoot, it would be rash to conclude that the creation of all novels ought to be based on a kind of glorified physical experience. The initial urge may disclose as many aspects as there are temperaments and talents; it may be the accumulated series of several practically unconscious shocks or it may be an inspired combination of several abstract ideas without a definite physical background.
But in one way or another the process may still be reduced to the most natural form of creative thrill — a sudden, live image constructed in a flash out of dissimilar units which are apprehended all at once in a stellar explosion of the mind." —Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, Swann’s Way
"Of course, no matter how keenly, how admirably, a story, a piece of music, a picture is discussed and analyzed, there will be minds that remain blank and spines that remain unkindled." —Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, The Metamorphosis
"We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can neither define, nor dismiss. Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. " —Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, The Metamorphosis
"Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual." —Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, The Metamorphosis
“We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little bit higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.” —Vladimir Nabokov, end-of-course lecture, Lit 311/312
“Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.” —Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin
“Time means succession, and succession, change:
Hence timelessness is bound to disarrange
Schedules of sentiment. We give advice
To widower. He has been married twice:
He meets his wives; both loved, both loving, both
Jealous of one another. Time means growth.
And growth means nothing in Elysian life.
Fondling a changeless child, the flax-haired wife
Grieves on the brink of a remembered pond
Full of a dreamy sky. And, also blond,
But with a touch of tawny in the shade,
Feet up, knees clasped, on a stone balustrade
The other sits and raises a moist gaze
Toward the blue impenetrable haze.
How to begin? Which first to kiss? What toy
To give the babe? Does that small solemn boy
Know of the head-on crash which on a wild
March night killed both the mother and the child?
And she, the second love, with instep bare
In ballerina black, why does she wear
The earrings from the other's jewel case?
And why does she avert her fierce young face?“ —Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, 566-588
“I’m puzzled by the difference between
Two methods of composing: A, the kind
Which goes on solely in the poet's mind,
A testing of performing words, while he
Is soaping a third time one leg, and B,
The other kind, much more decorous, when
He's in his study writing with a pen.
In method B the hand supports the thought,
The abstract battle is concretely fought.
The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar
A canceled sunset or restore a star,
And thus it physically guides the phrase
Toward faint daylight through the inky maze.
But method A is agony! The brain
Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain.
A muse in overalls directs the drill
Which grinds and which no effort of the will
Can interrupt, while the automaton
Is taking off what he has just put on
Or walking briskly to the corner store
To buy the paper he has read before.
Why is it so? Is it, perhaps, because
In penless work there is no pen-poised pause
And one must use three hands at the same time,
Having to choose the necessary rhyme,
Hold the completed line before one's eyes,
And keep in mind all the preceding tries?
Or is the process deeper with no desk
To prop the false and hoist the poetesque?
—Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (840-868)
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns." —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
“…surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.” —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
“Words without experience are meaningless.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
“I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.” —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
“There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies—a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.” —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
'The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.' —Vladimir Nabokov; Speak, Memory
“That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.” —Vladimir Nabokov; Speak, Memory
"There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbour, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline, or a lady's bicycle and a striped cat oddly sharing a rudimentary balcony of cast iron, it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship's funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture – Find What the Sailor Has Hidden – that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen."
—Vladimir Nabokov; Speak, Memory
“Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.”
—Vladimir Nabokov; Speak, Memory
"Eccentricity is the greatest grief's greatest remedy." ―Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor
"What are dreams? A random sequence of events, trivial or magic, viatic or static, fantastic or familiar, featuring more or less plausible events patched up with grotesque details, and recasting dead people in new settings." ―Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor
“When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowing corridor.” ―Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor
“After the first contact, so light, so mute, between his soft lips and her softer skin had been established – high up in that dappled tree, with only that stray ardilla daintily leavesdropping – nothing seemed changed in one sense, all was lost in another. Such contacts evolve their own texture; a tactile sensation is a blind spot; we touch in silhouette.” —Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, Part I
“But now I think that I should have taken the risk of speaking, of stammering, for I see now that it is just as dreadfully hard to put my heart and honor in script—even more so because in speaking one can use a stutter as a shutter, and plead a chance slurring of words, like a bleeding hare with one side of its mouth shot off, or twist back, and improve; but against a background of snow, even the blue snow of this notepaper, the blunders are red and final. I implore you.” —Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, Part II
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.” —Carl Sagan
"In what sense is the money in our pockets and bank accounts fully ‘ours’? Did we earn it by our own autonomous efforts? Could we have inherited it without the assistance of probate courts? Do we save it without the support of bank regulators? Could we spend it if there were no public officials to coordinate the efforts and pool the resources of the community in which we live? Without taxes, there would be no liberty. Without taxes there would be no property. Without taxes, few of us would have any assets worth defending. [It is] a dim fiction that some people enjoy and exercise their rights without placing any burden whatsoever on the public… There is no liberty without dependency...
If government could not intervene effectively, none of the individual rights to which Americans have become accustomed could be reliably protected. [...] This is why the overused distinction between "negative" and "positive" rights makes little sense. Rights to private property, freedom of speech, immunity from police abuse, contractual liberty and free exercise of religion – just as much as rights to Social Security, Medicare and food stamps – are taxpayer-funded and government-managed social services designed to improve collective and individual well-being." —Cass Sunstein
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy his own heart?" —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"You who are so-called illegal aliens must know that no human being is ‘illegal’. That is a contradiction in terms. Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful, they can be fat or skinny, they can be right or wrong, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal?" —Elie Weisel
"Once you label a people ‘illegal,’ that is exactly what the Nazis did to Jews.’ You do not label a people ‘illegal.’ They have committed an illegal act. They are immigrants who crossed illegally. They are immigrants who crossed without papers. They are immigrants who crossed without permission. They are living in this country without permission. But they are not an illegal people.” —Elie Weisel
“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.” —Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
“No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.” —Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.” ―Kurt Vonnegut
"There's only one rule that I know of ... 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.' " —Kurt Vonnegut
“Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.” —Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
“I urge you to please notice when you are happy.” —Kurt Vonnegut
"The ends may justify the means so long as there is something that justifies the end." —Leon Trotsky
“I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.” —Sigmund Freud
"He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore." —Sigmund Freud
"Military oppression is not Martial Law: it is the abuse of the power which that law confers. As Martial Law is executed by military force, it is incumbent upon those who administer it to be strictly guided by the principles of justice, honor, and humanity - virtues adorning a soldier even more than other men, for the very reason that he possesses the power of his arms against the unarmed." —Franz Lieber, Lieber Code, Art. 4
“Military necessity does not admit of cruelty - that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions. It does not admit of the use of poison in any way, nor of the wanton devastation of a district. It admits of deception, but disclaims acts of perfidy; and, in general, military necessity does not include any act of hostility which makes the return to peace unnecessarily difficult.” —Franz Lieber, Leiber Code Art. 16
“Classical works of art, libraries, scientific collections, or precious instruments, such as astronomical telescopes, as well as hospitals, must be secured against all avoidable injury, even when they are contained in fortified places whilst besieged or bombarded.” —Franz Lieber, Lieber Code Art. 35
"My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there." —Rumi
"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." —Rumi
"Whatever I was looking for was always you." —Rumi
'What you have despised in yourself as a thorn opens into a rose.' —Rumi
“This is a subtle truth: whatever you love, you are." —Rumi
"Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes 'round in another form." —Rumi
"In the shambles of love, they kill only the best." —Rumi
"In generosity and helping others, be like a river… In compassion and grace, be like sun… In concealing others’ faults, be like night… In anger and fury, be like dead… In modesty and humility, be like earth… In tolerance, be like a sea… Either exist as you are, or be as you look." —Rumi
"Love is an emotion, totally silent and inexpressible with words." —Rumi
“It seems, as one becomes older, that the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—“ —T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, II. Dry Salvages
“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.” —T.S. Eliot, East Coker
"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." —T.S. Eliot, Preface to Harry Crosby, Transit of Venus
“The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” —T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding V, Four Quartets
“If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you must accept the terms it offers you.” —T.S. Eliot
"What every poet starts from is his own emotions… Shakespeare, too, was occupied with the struggle...to transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal." —T. S. Eliot, Impersonality
'I have seen the birth and death of several purely literary periodicals; and I say of all of them that in isolating the concept of literature they destroy the life of literature.' —T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Literary Review
'… a good love poem, though it may be addressed to one person, is always meant to be overheard by other people. Surely, the proper language of love – that is, of communication to the beloved and to no one else – is prose.' —T. S. Eliot, The Three Voices of Poetry
"We need an admixture of weakness with either heroic virtue or satanic villainy, to make character plausible. Iago frightens me more than Richard III; I am not sure that Parolles, in All’s Well That Ends Well, does not disturb me more than Iago. (And I am quite sure that Rosamund Vincy, in Middlemarch, frightens me far more than Goneril or Regan.)" —T. S. Eliot, The Three Voices of Poetry
"If you complain that a poet is obscure, and apparently ignoring you, the reader, or that he is speaking only to a limited circle of initiates from which you are excluded – remember that what he may have been trying to do, was to put something into words which could not be said in any other way, and therefore in a language which may be worth the trouble of learning." —T. S. Eliot, The Three Voices of Poetry
“I have been known to procrastinate even longer.“ —T.S. Eliot to Edward Forbes, 22 May 1911
“It [poetry] may effect revolutions in sensibility such as are periodically needed... It may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate…” —T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)
“Obviously a poet has got to find a way of making a living apart from his poetry.” —T. S. Eliot, interview with The Paris Review (The Art of Fiction No. 1), Issue 21, Spring-Summer 1951
Bernardo Erlich
[edit]"Se ha puesto tan serio el mundo que el humor es una profesión de riesgo. [The world has become so serious that humor is a risky profession.]" —Bernardo Erlich, on the January 2015 attacks
"Je préfère mourir debout que vivre à genoux. [I'd prefer to die on my feet than to live on my knees.]" —Stéphane 'Charb' Charbonnier
“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” —Albert Einstein
"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed." —Carl Jung
"'You will never marry again, Lady Narborough,' broke in Lord Henry. 'You were far too happy. When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.'" —Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.” —Oscar Wilde, Conversation with Ada "the Sphinx" Leverson
"Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forests know of, birds that no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread. Hers are the 'forms more real than living man,' and hers the great archetypes of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies." —Oscar Wilde
"The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless." —Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
'Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.' —Oscar Wilde
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” —Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde.
“Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.” —Oscar Wilde
"No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite." —Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” —Nelson Mandela
"In homes where the near friends and visitors are mainly literary people—lawyers, judges, professors and clergymen—the children's ears become early familiarized with wide vocabularies. It is natural for them to pick up any words that fall their way; it is natural for them to pick up big and little ones indiscriminately; it is natural for them to use without fear any word that comes to their net, no matter how formidable it may be as to size. As a result, their talk is a curious and funny musketry clatter of little words, interrupted at intervals by the heavy-artillery crash of a word of such imposing sound and size that it seems to shake the ground and rattle the windows. Sometimes the child gets a wrong idea of a word which it has picked up by chance, and attaches to it a meaning which impairs its usefulness—but this does not happen as often as one might expect it would. Indeed, it happens with an infrequency which may be regarded as remarkable." —Mark Twain
"Man is the Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion-- several of them." —Mark Twain
"God created war so that Americans would learn geography." —Mark Twain
"Repetition may be bad, but surely inexactness is worse." —Mark Twain, The Awful German Language
“But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?” —Mark Twain
“All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.” —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
"In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful." —Leo Tolstoy
"Tell people that war is an evil, and they will laugh; for who does not know it? Tell them that patriotism is an evil, and most of them will agree, but with a reservation. "Yes," they will say, "wrong patriotism is an evil; but there is another kind, the kind we hold." But just what this good patriotism is, no one explains." —Leo Tolstoy
"Yes! It’s all vanity, it’s all an illusion, everything except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing – that’s all there is. But there isn’t even that. There’s nothing but stillness and peace." —Leo Tolstoy, Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, War and Peace
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? ...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us." —Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak (27 January 1904)
“The meaning of life is that it stops.” ―Franz Kafka
"I’m doing badly, I’m doing well, whichever you prefer.” —Franz Kafka
"There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe...but not for us." —Franz Kafka, letter to Milena Jesenská (1920)
"Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to misery." —Franz Kafka
"Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet." —Franz Kafka, Aphorisms
"I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us anymore." —Franz Kafka, The Castle
"Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live." —Franz Kafka, The Trial
"I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person."
— Franz Kafka
"In the struggle between yourself and the world, back the world." ―Franz Kafka, The Zurau Aphorisms
"'Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armor yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.'" —George R.R. Martin, Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones, Jon I
"'There is no creature on earth half so terrifying as a truly just man.'" —George R.R. Martin, Lord Varys, A Game of Thrones, Eddard XIV
"'...love is the bane of honor, the death of duty.'" —George R.R. Martin, Maester Aemon Targaryen, A Game of Thrones, Jon VIII
"'What is honor compared to a woman's love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms … or the memory of a brother's smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.'" —George R.R. Martin, Maester Aemon Targaryen, A Game of Thrones, Jon VIII
"'Any man can be brave when there is nothing to fear. We all do our duty when there is no cost to it. How easy it seems then, to walk the path of honor. Yet soon or late there comes a day when it is not easy, a day when we must choose.'" —George R.R. Martin, Maester Aemon Targaryen, A Game of Thrones, Jon VIII
"'Power resides only where men believe it resides. [...] A shadow on the wall, yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.'" —George R.R. Martin, Lord Varys, A Clash of Kings, Tyrion II
"We look up at the same stars, and see such different things." —George R.R. Martin, Jon Snow, A Storm of Swords, Jon III
"'There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They've heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know.
Then they get a taste of battle.
For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they've been gutted by an axe.
They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that's still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water.
If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they're fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it's just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don't know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they're fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world...
And the man breaks.
He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them...but he should pity them as well.'” —George R.R. Martin, A Feast For Crows, Septon Meribald, Brienne V
"'A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies...the man who never reads lives only one.'" —George R.R. Martin, Jojen Reed, A Dance With Dragons, Bran III
"I might even show you my photograph album. You might even see a face in it which might remind you of your own, of what you once were. You might see faces of others, in shadow, or cheeks of others, turning, or jaws, or backs of necks, or eyes, dark under hats, which might remind you of others, whom once you knew, whom you thought long dead, but from whom you will still receive a sidelong glance, if you can face the good ghost. Allow the love of the good ghost. They possess all that emotion ... trapped. Bow to it. It will assuredly never release them, but who knows ... what relief ... it may give them ... who knows how they may quicken ... in their chains, in their glass jars. You think it cruel ... to quicken them, when they are fixed, imprisoned? No ... no. Deeply, deeply, they wish to respond to your touch, to your look, and when you smile, their joy ... is unbounded. And so I say to you, tender the dead, as you would yourself be tendered, now, in what you would describe as your life." —Harold Pinter, No Man's Land
'Liberalism is the philosophy for our time, because it does not try to conserve every tradition of the past, because it does not apply to new problems the old doctrinaire solutions, because it is prepared to experiment and innovate and because it knows that the past is less important than the future.' —Pierre Trudeau
"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." —Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Ch. 34
"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists." —Ernest Hemingway, Notes on the Next War
"'What happens to people that love each other?' 'I suppose they have whatever they have and they are more fortunate than others. Then one of them gets the emptiness for ever.'" —Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and Into the Trees, Ch. 38, Colonel Richard Cantwell and Renata
"Never think that war, no matter how necessary, no matter how justified, is not a crime." —Ernest Hemingway, Introduction to 'Treasury for the Free World' by Ben Raeburn, 1946
"The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable: they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed." —Ernest Hemingway
“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.” ―Isaac Asimov
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." ―Isaac Asimov, Foundation
"If there is a misuse of power, it is on her part. My crime is that I have never labored to make myself popular — I admit that much — and I have paid too little attention to fools who are old enough to be senile but young enough to have power." —Isaac Asimov, Foundation's Edge
"To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war." —Winston Churchill, remarks at a White House luncheon (June 26, 1954)
"There never was a good war or a bad peace." —Benjamin Franklin
"War may be unavoidable sometimes, but its progeny are terrible to contemplate." —Jawaharlal Nehru
"Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson." —François-Marie Arouet 'Voltaire', 'Civil and Ecclesiastical Laws', Dictionnaire philosophique (1785-1789)
"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets." —François-Marie Arouet 'Voltaire', "Rights" (1771)
'When we wear mourning for a king of Sweden, Denmark, England or Prussia, do we say that we are in mourning for a damned soul that is burning eternally in hell? There are about forty millions of inhabitants in Europe who are not members of the Church of Rome; should we say to every one of them, "Sir, since you are infallibly damned, I shall neither eat, converse, nor have any connections with you?"' —François-Marie Arouet 'Voltaire', Treatise on Tolerance
'Aime la vérité, mais pardonne à l'erreur. [Love truth, but pardon error).]' —François-Marie Arouet 'Voltaire'
'Il vaut mieux hasarder de sauver un coupable que de condamner un innocent. [It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.] —François-Marie Arouet 'Voltaire'
'Qui plume a, guerre a. [To hold a pen is to be at war.]' —François-Marie Arouet 'Voltaire'
'C'est une des superstitions de l'esprit humain d'avoir imaginé que la virginité pouvait être une vertu. [It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.]' —François-Marie Arouet 'Voltaire'
'Prier Dieu c'est se flatter qu'avec des paroles on changera toute la nature. [To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.]' —François-Marie Arouet 'Voltaire'
'Si Dieu nous a faits à son image, nous le lui avons bien rendu.' —François-Marie Arouet 'Voltaire'
'Il est dangereux d’avoir raison dans des choses où des hommes accrédités ont tort. [It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.]' —François-Marie Arouet 'Voltaire'
'Les opinions ont plus causé de maux sur ce petit globe que la peste et les tremblements de terre. [Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.]' —François-Marie Arouet 'Voltaire'
'Il y a des vérités qui ne sont pas pour tous les hommes et pour tous les temps. [There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.]' —François-Marie Arouet 'Voltaire'
'La foi consiste à croire ce que la raison ne croit pas. [Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.'] —François-Marie Arouet 'Voltaire'
"Illusion is the first of all pleasures." —François-Marie Arouet 'Voltaire'
"Hawkeye: War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy: How do you figure, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander." —M*A*S*H
"I have never advocated war except as means of peace, so seek peace, but prepare for war. Because war... War never changes. War is like winter and winter is coming." —Ulysses S. Grant
'“Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?" "Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.”' ―Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
'Time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity.... But the tale of history forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time, and checks in some measure its irresistible flow, so that, of all things done in it, as many as history has taken over it secures and binds together, and does not allow them to slip away into the abyss of oblivion.' —Anna Comnena, preface to the Alexiad
Clark Kerr
[edit]'The University is not engaged in making ideas safe for students. It is engaged in making students safe for ideas. Thus it permits the freest expression of views before students, trusting to their good sense in passing judgment on these views.' —Clark Kerr
"I can't go on, I'll go on." —Samuel Beckett
"To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering." —Friedrich Nietzsche
“For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ
"That which translates worst from one language into another is the tempo of its style..." —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 28
"In the end, to be sure, to present the debit side of the account to these religions and to bring into the light of day their uncanny perilousness—it costs dear and terribly when religions hold sway, not as means of education and breeding in the hands of the philosopher, but in their own right and as sovereign, when they themselves want to be final ends and not means beside other means." —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 62
"‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that’—says my pride, and remains adamant. At last—memory yields." —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 68
"The sage as astronomer. —As long as you still feel the stars as being something ‘over you’ you still lack the eye of the man of knowledge." —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 71
"Many a peacock hides his peacock tail from all eyes—and calls it his pride." —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 73a
"Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself." —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 76
"It is dreadful to die of thirst in the sea. Do you have to salt your truth so much that it can no longer even—quench thirst?" —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 81
"Instinct—When the house burns down one forgets even one’s dinner. –Yes: but one retrieves it from the ashes." —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 83
"Bound heart, free spirit—If one binds one’s heart firmly and imprisons it one can allow one’s spirit many liberties: I have said that before. But no one believes it if he does not already know it." —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 87
"Heavy, melancholy people grow lighter through precisely that which makes others heavy, through hatred and love, and for a while they rise to their surface." —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 90
"To be ashamed of one’s immorality: that is a step on the ladder at the end of which one is also ashamed of one’s morality." —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 95
"One ought to depart from life as Odysseus departed from Nausicaa—blessing rather than in love with it." —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 96
"By means of music the passions enjoy themselves." —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 106
"One is punished most for one’s virtues." —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 132
"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 146
"That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil." —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 153
"The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night." —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 157
"To our strongest drive, the tyrant in us, not only our reason but also our conscience submits." —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 158
"‘Our neighbour is not our neighbour but our neighbour’s neighbour’—thus thinks every people." —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 162
"Alas! what are you, after all, my written and painted thoughts! Not long ago you were so variegated, young and malicious, so full of thorns and secret spices, that you made me sneeze and laugh—and now? You have already doffed your novelty, and some of you, I fear, are ready to become truths, so immortal do they look, so pathetically honest, so tedious! And was it ever otherwise? What then do we write and paint, we mandarins with Chinese brush, we immortalisers of things which LEND themselves to writing, what are we alone capable of painting? Alas, only that which is just about to fade and begins to lose its odour! Alas, only exhausted and departing storms and belated yellow sentiments! Alas, only birds strayed and fatigued by flight, which now let themselves be captured with the hand—with OUR hand! We immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer, things only which are exhausted and mellow! And it is only for your AFTERNOON, you, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have colours, many colours, perhaps, many variegated softenings, and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds;—but nobody will divine thereby how ye looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and marvels of my solitude, you, my old, beloved—EVIL thoughts!" —Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 296
"What if pleasure and pain are so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other, that he who wants to experience the 'heavenly high jubilation' must also be ready to be 'sorrowful unto death?'" — Friedrich Nietzsche
"Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude. In the tumult of civil discord, the laws of society lose their force, and their place is seldom supplied by those of humanity. The ardour of contention, the pride of victory, the despair of success, the memory of past injuries, and the fear of future dangers, all contribute to inflame the mind, and to silence the voice of pity." —Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I, Chapter IV
“…the immortality of the soul is on some occasions a very comfortable doctrine.” —Edward Gibbon, letter to Lord Sheffield, 10 May 1786, Lausanne
"Freedom of expression does not truly exist if the right can be exercised only in an area that a benevolent government has provided as a safe haven for crackpots." —Abe Fortas, Tinker v. Des Moines (1969)
"All history is man's efforts to realise ideals." —Éamon de Valera
"But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not t’ have years told.
Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be." --William Shakespare, Sonnet 138
'Hath
not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.' —William Shakespeare, Shylock, The Merchant of Venice, (III.i.73-78)
"The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stategems, and spoils.
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus." —William Shakespeare, Lorenzo, The Merchant of Venice (V.i.82-86)
“Is this her fault or mine?
The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?” —William Shakespeare, Angelo, Measure for Measure (II.ii.)
“And now I will unclasp a secret book,
And to your quick-conceiving discontents
I’ll read you matter deep and dangerous,
As full of peril and adventurous spirit
As to o’erwalk a current roaring loud
On the unsteadfast footing of a spear.”
—William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 1 (I.iii.182-192)
"Do you not love me? Do you not indeed?
Well, do not then, for since you love me not,
I will not love myself. Do you not love me?" --William Shakespeare; Elizabeth, Lady Percy; Henry IV Part 1 (II.iii.89-91)
“Things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour.” —William Shakespeare, John of Gaunt, Richard II (I.iii.229)
“This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Of as a moat defensive to a house
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Feared by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renownèd for their deeds as far from home
For Christian service and true chivalry
As is the sepulchre, in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world’s random, blessèd Mary’s son; This land of dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out—I die pronouncing it—
Like to a tenement or or pelting farm.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of wat’ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds.
That England that was wont to conquer others
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.” —William Shakespeare, John of Gaunt, Richard II (II.i.40-66)
"Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let's choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones." —William Shakespeare, Richard II, Richard II (III.ii.141-150)
"...for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!" —William Shakespeare, Richard II, Richard II (III.ii.156-166)
“Speak sweetly, man, although thy looks be sour.” —William Shakespeare, King Richard, Richard II (III.ii.189)
“Men judge by the complexion of the sky
The state and inclination of the day:
So may you by my dull and heavy eye,
My tongue hath but a heavier tale to say.” —William Shakespeare, Scrope, Richard II (III.ii.190-193)
“For night-owls shriek where mounting larks
should sing.” —William Shakespeare, King Richard, Richard II (III.iii.182)
“Tears show their love, but want their remedies.” —William Shakespeare, King Richard, Richard II (III.iii.201)
“For if of joy, being altogether wanting,
It doth remember me the more of sorrow.
Or if of grief, being altogether head,
It adds more sorrow to my want of joy.” —William Shakespeare, Queen, Richard II (III.iv.14-17)
“Give sorrow leave awhile to tutor me
To this submission.” —William Shakespeare, Richard, Richard II (IV.i.157-158)
“Your cares set up do not pluck my cares down.
My care is loss of care, by old care done;
Your care is gain of care, by new care won.
The cares I give I have, though given away;
They ‘tend the crown, yet still with me they stay.” —William Shakespeare, Richard, Richard II (IV.i.185-189)
“‘The shadow of my sorrow’—ha! let's see.
'Tis very true: my grief lies all within,
And these external manners of laments
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortured soul…” —William Shakespeare, Richard, Richard II (IV.i.284-288)
“…is there no plot
To rid the realm of this pernicious blot?” —William Shakespeare, Aumerle, Richard II (IV.i.314-315)
“The love of wicked friends converts to fear,
That fear to hate, and hate turns one or both
To worthy danger and deservèd death.” —William Shakespeare, Richard, Richard II (V.i.66-69)
“That were some love but little policy.” —William Shakespeare, Northumberland, Richard II (V.i.84)
“Since, wedding it, there is such length in grief.
One kiss shall stop our mouths, and dumbly part.
Thus give I mine, and thus take I thy heart.” —William Shakespeare, Richard, Richard II (V.i.94-96)
“So shall my virtue be his vice's bawd,
And he shall spend mine honour with his shame,
As thriftless sons their scraping fathers' gold.” —William Shakespeare, York, Richard II (V.iii.65-68)
“Twice saying 'pardon' doth not pardon twain,
But makes one pardon strong.” —William Shakespeare, Duchess of York, Richard II (V.iii.132-133)
“Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
With being nothing.” —William Shakespeare, Richard, Richard II (V.v.39-41)
“Ha, ha; keep time! How sour sweet music is
When time is broke and no proportion kept.
So is it in the music of men's lives.” —William Shakespeare, Richard, Richard II (V.v.42-44)
“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me…” —William Shakespeare, King Richard, Richard II (V.v.49)
“Go thou, and fill another room in hell.” —William Shakespeare, Richard, Richard II (V.v.107)
“Mount, mount, my soul; thy seat is up on high;
Whilst my gross flesh sinks downward, here to die.” —William Shakespeare, Richard, Richard II (V.v.111-112)
“For though mine enemy thou hast ever been,
High sparks of honour in thee have I seen.” —William Shakespeare, King Henry, Richard II (V.v.28-29)
“That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder,
Whereto the climber upward turns his face.
But when he once attains the upmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend.” — William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (II.i. 22-27)
“Stand fast together.” —William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (III.i.103)
"And whether we shall meet again I know not.
Therefore our everlasting farewell take.
Forever and forever farewell...
If we do meet again, why, we shall smile.
If not, why then this parting was well made." —William Shakespeare, Brutus, Julius Caesar (V.i. 116-120)
'...foul deeds will rise,
Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes.' —William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Hamlet (I.ii.469-470)
'..Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in,
Bear ’t that th’ opposèd may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.' —William Shakespeare, Laertes, Hamlet (I.iii.542-546)
'Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.' —William Shakespeare, Marcellus, Hamlet (I.iv.95)
'These are but wild and whirling words, my lord.' —William Shakespeare, Horatio, Hamlet (I.v.133)
'The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!' —William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Hamlet (I.v.190-191)
'Brevity is the soul of wit.' —William Shakespeare, Polonius, Hamlet (II.ii.90)
'Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love.' —William Shakespeare, Polonius (letter from Ophelia), Hamlet (II.ii.116-119)
'Though this be madness, yet there is method
in 't.' —William Shakespeare, Polonius, Hamlet (II.ii.195)
'There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.' —William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Hamlet (II.ii.252-253)
'Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very
substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.' —William Shakespeare, Guildenstern, Hamlet (II.ii.276-277)
'What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust?' —William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Hamlet (II.ii.305-310)
'...an old man is twice a child.' —William Shakespeare, Rosencrantz, Hamlet (II.ii.387)
“We are oft to blame in this—
’Tis too much prov’d—that with devotion’s visage
And pious action we do sugar o’er
The devil himself.” — William Shakespeare, Polonius, Hamlet (III.i.4-7)
'To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.' —William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Hamlet (III.i.58-92)
'Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.' —William Shakespeare, Ophelia, Hamlet (III.i.103)
- Ophelia
Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than
with honesty?
- Hamlet
Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner
transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the
force of honesty can translate beauty into his
likeness: this was sometime a paradox, but now the
time gives it proof. I did love you once.' —William Shakespeare, Hamlet (III.i.111-117)
'Madness in great ones must not unwatch'd go.' —William Shakespeare, King Claudius, Hamlet (III.i.191)
'...the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the
first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the
mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature,
scorn her own image, and the very age and body of
the time his form and pressure...' —William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Hamlet (III.ii.20-26)
'Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear;
Where little fears grow great, great love grows there.' —William Shakespeare, Player Queen, Hamlet (III.ii.164-165 Q2)
'Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament;
Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.' —William Shakespeare, Player King, Hamlet (III.ii.189-190)
'This world is not for aye, nor 'tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change;
For 'tis a question left us yet to prove,
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.' —William Shakespeare, Player King, Hamlet (III.ii.191-195)
'The poor advanced makes friends of enemies.
And hitherto doth love on fortune tend;
For who not needs shall never lack a friend,
And who in want a hollow friend doth try,
Directly seasons him his enemy.' —William Shakespeare, Player King, Hamlet (III.ii.196-200)
'The lady protests too much, methinks.' —William Shakespeare, Gertrude, Hamlet (III.ii.219)
'Whereto serves mercy
But to confront the visage of offence?' —William Shakespeare, King Claudius, Hamlet (III.iii.46-47)
'In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law...' —William Shakespeare, King Claudius, Hamlet (III.iii.57-60)
'Words without thoughts never to heaven go.' —William Shakespeare, King Claudius, Hamlet (III.iii.98)
'O shame! where is thy blush?' —William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Hamlet (III.iv.72)
'...we know what we are, but know not
what we may be...' —William Shakespeare, Ophelia, Hamlet (IV.v.42-43)
'When sorrows come, they come not single spies
But in battalions.' —William Shakespeare, King Claudius, Hamlet (IV.v.76-77)
'Nature is fine in love, and where 'tis fine,
It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves.' —William Shakespeare, Laertes, Hamlet (IV.v.162-164)
'There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.' —William Shakespeare, Queen Gertrude, Hamlet (IV.vii.138-155)
'We should profane the service of the dead
To sing a requiem and such rest to her
As to peace-parted souls.' —William Shakespeare, Priest, Hamlet (V.i.231-233)
“If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.” —William Shakespeare, Orsino, Twelfth Night (I.i.1-3)
“Love sought is good, but giv’n unsought is better.” —William Shakespeare, Olivia, Twelfth Night (III.i.141)
"Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it." —William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Macbeth (I.iv.7-8)
"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more..." —William Shakespeare, King Henry V, Henry V (III.i.1)
“’tis true that we are in great danger,
The greater therefore should our courage be” — William Shakespeare, Henry V, Henry V (IV.i.1-2)
"Tis not the worst. So long as we can say 'this is the worst.'" --William Shakespeare, King Lear (IV.i.32-33)
“Is wretchedness deprived that benefit
To end itself by death?” —William Shakespeare, King Lear (IV.vi.75-76)
“Jesters do oft prove prophets.” —William Shakespeare, Regan, King Lear (V.iii.64)
""Wuthering" being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun." —Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
"'I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.'" —Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
"'I can not express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff - he's always, always in my mind - not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself - but as my own being; so, don't talk of our separation again - it is impracticable.'" —Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
'"On a mellow evening in September, I was coming from the garden with a heavy basket of apples which I had been gathering. It had got dusk, and the moon looked over the high wall of the court, causing undefined shadows to lurk in the corners of the numerous projecting portions of the building. I set my burden on the house steps by the kitchen door, and lingered to rest, and draw in a few more breaths of the soft, sweet air; my eyes were on the moon, and my back to the entrance, when I heard a voice behind me say —" "'Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you — haunt me then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe; I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss where I can not find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!'" —Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
"'Treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends — they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies.'" —Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
"I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." —Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
"It is not women's inferiority that has determined their historical insignificance; it is their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority." —Simone de Beauvoir
Michael McConville
[edit]“They [pigeons] may wander. But their natural instinct is to come back to the place that they’re born.” -Michael McConville
"Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield! Against stupidity the very gods Themselves contend in vain." —Friedrich Schiller, The Maid of Orleans
"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered." —Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
"Every exit is an entrance somewhere else." —Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
“Finding an idea for a play is like picking up a shell on a beach.” —Tom Stoppard, The Art of Theatre No. 7, The Paris Review, Issue 109, Winter 1988
"Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?" —It's a Wonderful Life, Clarence Oddbody
'I thank thee, friend, for the beautiful thought
That in words well chosen thou gavest to me,
Deep in the life of my soul it has wrought
With its own rare essence to ever imbue me,
To gleam like a star over devious ways,
To bloom like a flower on the drearest days
Better such gift from thee to me
Than gold of the hills or pearls of the sea.
For the luster of jewels and gold may depart,
And they have in them no life of the giver,
But this gracious gift from thy heart to my heart
Shall witness to me of thy love forever;
Yea, it shall always abide with me
As a part of my immortality;
For a beautiful thought is a thing divine,
So I thank thee, oh, friend, for this gift of thine!’ —Katherine Mansfield
"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." —Abraham Lincoln
'O weep not, love! each tear that springs
In those dear eyes of thine,
To me a keener suffering brings
Than if they flowed from mine.
And do not droop! however drear
The fate awaiting thee.
For my sake, combat pain and care,
And cherish life for me!
I do not fear thy love will fail,
Thy faith is true I know;
But O! my love! thy strength is frail
For such a life of woe.
Were't not for this, I well could trace
(Though banished long from thee)
Life's rugged path, and boldly face
The storms that threaten me.
Fear not for me - I've steeled my mind
Sorrow and strife to greet,
Joy with my love I leave behind,
Care with my friends I meet.'
—Anne Brontë
"One should always be drunk. That's all that matters... But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk." —Charles Baudelaire, Petits poèmes en prose; Le spleen de Paris
"Heroes or madmen –two classes of imbeciles greatly resembling each other." — Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
“So much the worse for those who fear wine, for it is because they have some bad thoughts which they are afraid the liquor will extract from their hearts.” —Alexandre Dumas, pére; The Count of Monte Cristo
“All human wisdom is contained in these two words — "Wait and Hope.” ―Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
“No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid; but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.” —George Orwell, Reflections on Gandhi
"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil . . . Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not." —George Orwell, during The Blitz
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort, are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once... This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people’s motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions. For there are occasions when even the most misguided person can see the results of what he is doing. Here is a crude but quite possible illustration. A pacifist is working in some job which gives him access to important military information, and is approached by a German secret agent. In those circumstances his subjective feelings do make a difference. If he is subjectively pro-Nazi he will sell his country, and if he isn’t, he won’t. And situations essentially similar though less dramatic are constantly arising. In my opinion a few pacifists are inwardly pro-Nazi, and extremist left-wing parties will inevitably contain Fascist spies. The important thing is to discover which individuals are honest and which are not, and the usual blanket accusation merely makes this more difficult. The atmosphere of hatred in which controversy is conducted blinds people to considerations of this kind. To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like. It is this habit of mind, among other things, that has made political prediction in our time so remarkably unsuccessful." —George Orwell, As I Please
"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" —George Orwell, 1984
'Sincere enthusiasm is the only orator who always persuades. It is like an art the rules of which never fail; the simplest man with enthusiasm persuades better than the most eloquent with none.' —François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, Nr. 8
'If we had no faults, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.' —François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, Nr. 30
'It is impossible to love again anything you have truly ceased to love.' —François de La Rouchefoucauld, Maximes, Nr. 286
"...it's never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn't hurt you..." —Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
"'You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.'" —Harper Lee, Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird
"'I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'" —Harper Lee, Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird
"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do." —Harper Lee, Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird
The Dalai Lama
[edit]"...when encountering injustice, take a strong stand – but with no ill intent." —The 14th Dalai Lama
"Violent zeal for truth hath an hundred to one odds to be either petulancy, ambition, or pride." —Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Religion
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad." —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"The joy of living, I say, was summed up for me in the remembered sensation of that first burning and aromatic swallow, that mixture of milk and coffee and bread by which men hold communion with tranquil pastures, exotic plantations, and golden harvests, communion with the earth. Amidst all these stars there was but one that could make itself significant for us by composing this aromatic bowl that was its daily gift at dawn. And from that earth of men, that earth docile to the reaping of grain and the harvesting of the grape, bearing its rivers asleep in their fields, its villages clinging to their hillsides, our ship was separated by astronomical distances. All the treasures of the world were summed up in a grain of dust now blown far out of our path by the very destiny itself of dust and of the orbs of the night." —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes
"Thus is the earth at once a desert and a paradise, rich in secret hidden gardens, gardens inaccessible, but to which the craft leads us ever back, one day or another. Life may scatter us and keep us apart; it may prevent us from thinking very often of one another; but we know that out comrades are somewhere "out there"—where, one can hardly say—silent, forgotten, but deeply faithful." —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes
"Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak." —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes
"So life goes on. For years we plant the seed, we feel ourselves rich; and then come other years when time does its work and our plantation is made sparse and thin. One by one, our comrades slip away, deprive us of their shade." —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes
"And when we grow to be me and live under other laws, what remains of that park filled with the shadows of childhood, magical, freezing, burning? What do we learn when we return to it and stroll it a sort of despair along the outside of its little wall of grey stone, marveling that within a space so small we should have founded a kingdom that had seemed to us infinite—what do we learn except that in this infinity we shall never again set foot, and that it is into the game and not the park we have lost the power to enter?" —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes
"Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living." —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes
"What all of us want is to be set free." —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes
"Why should we hate one another? We all live in the same cause, are borne through life on the same planet, form the crew of the same ship. Civilizations may, indeed, compete to bring forth new syntheses, but it is monstrous that they should devour one another." —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes
"The man who can see the miraculous in a poem, who can take pure joy from music, who can break his bread with comrades, opens his window to the same refreshing wind off the sea. He too learns a language of men.
But too many men are left unawakened." —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes
“The true life of the desert is not made up of the marches of tribes in search of pasture, but of the game that goes endlessly on. What a difference in substance between the sands of submission and the sands of unruliness! The dunes, the salines change their nature according as the code changes by which they are governed. And is not all the world like this? Gazing at this transfigured desert I remember the games of my childhood—the dark and golden park we peopled with gods; the limitless kingdom we made of this square mile never thoroughly explored, never thoroughly charted. We created a secret civilization where footfalls had a meaning and and things a savor known in no other world.
And when we grow up to be men and live under other laws, what remains of that park filled with the shadows of childhood, magical, freezing, burning? What do we learn when we return to it and stroll with a sort of despair along the outside of its little wall of grey stone, marveling that within a space so small we should have founded a kingdom that seemed to us infinite—what do we learn except that in this infinity we shall never again set foot, and that it is into the game and not the park that we have lost the power to enter?” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes
"A man's age is something impressive, it sums up his life: maturity reached slowly and against many obstacles, illnesses cured, griefs and despairs overcome, and unconscious risks taken; maturity formed through so many desires, hopes, regrets, forgotten things, loves. A man's age represents a fine cargo of experiences and memories."
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings, 1939-1944
"...the stars are set alight in heaven so that one day each one of us may find his own again..." —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the little prince, Le Petit Prince
“‘You know—one loves the sunset, when one is so sad…’” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the little prince, The Little Prince
"Words are the source of misunderstandings." —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the fox, The Little Prince
"Men have forgotten this truth. But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed." —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the fox, The Little Prince
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the fox, The Little Prince
"What makes the desert beautiful...is that somewhere it hides a well." —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the narrator, The Little Prince
"One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed…" —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the little prince, The Little Prince
"To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…" —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the fox, The Little Prince
"This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need of anything to drink.
"Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.
"Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week."
"And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?" "Anything you like . . ."
"As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.”" —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
"C'est véritablement utile puisque c'est joli. [It is truly useful since it is beautiful]" —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
"What good is the warmth of summer without the cold of winter to give it sweetness?" —John Steinbeck
"I'm learning one thing good...If you're in trouble or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones." — John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.” —John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
"To be alive at all is to have scars." —John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent
"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.” —John Steinbeck, East of Eden
“My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day.” — John Steinbeck, East of Eden.
"“Do you remember when you read us the sixteen verses of the fourth chapter of Genesis and we argued about them?”
“I do indeed. And that’s a long time ago.”
“Ten years nearly,” said Lee. “Well, the story bit deeply into me and I went into it word for word. The more I thought about the story, the more profound it became to me. Then I compared the translations we have—and they were fairly close. There was only one place that bothered me. The King James version says this—it is when Jehovah has asked Cain why he is angry. Jehovah says, ‘If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.’ It was the ‘thou shalt’ that struck me, because it was a promise that Cain would conquer sin.”
Samuel nodded. “And his children didn’t do it entirely,” he said.
Lee sipped his coffee. “Then I got a copy of the American Standard Bible. It was very new then. And it was different in this passage. It says, ‘Do thou rule over him.’ Now this is very different. This is not a promise, it is an order. And I began to stew about it. I wondered what the original word of the original writer had been that these very different translations could be made.”
Samuel put his palms down on the table and leaned forward and the old young light came into his eyes. “Lee,” he said, “don’t tell me you studied Hebrew!”
Lee said, “I’m going to tell you. And it’s a fairly long story. Will you have a touch of ng-ka-py?”
“You mean the drink that tastes of good rotten apples?”
“Yes. I can talk better with it.”
“Maybe I can listen better,” said Samuel.
While Lee went to the kitchen Samuel asked, “Adam, did you know about this?”
“No,” said Adam. “He didn’t tell me. Maybe I wasn’t listening.”
Lee came back with his stone bottle and three little porcelain cups so thin and delicate that the light shone through them. “Dlinkee Chinee fashion,” he said and poured the almost black liquor. “There’s a lot of wormwood in this. It’s quite a drink,” he said. “Has about the same effect as absinthe if you drink enough of it.”
Samuel sipped the drink. “I want to know why you were so interested,” he said.
“Well, it seemed to me that the man who could conceive this great story would know exactly what he wanted to say and there would be no confusion in his statement.”
“You say ‘the man.’ Do you then not think this is a divine book written by the inky finger of God?”
“I think the mind that could think this story was a curiously divine mind. We have had a few such minds in China too.”
“I just wanted to know,” said Samuel. “You’re not a Presbyterian after all.”
“I told you I was getting more Chinese. Well, to go on, I went to San Francisco to the headquarters of our family association. Do you know about them? Our great families have centers where any member can get help or give it. The Lee family is very large. It takes care of its own.”
“I have heard of them,” said Samuel.
“You mean Chinee hatchet man fightee Tong war over slave girl?”
“I guess so.”
“It’s a little different from that, really,” said Lee. “I went there because in our family there are a number of ancient reverend gentlemen who are great scholars. They are thinkers in exactness. A man may spend many years pondering a sentence of the scholar you call Confucius. I thought there might be experts in meaning who could advise me.
“They are fine old men. They smoke their two pipes of opium in the afternoon and it rests and sharpens them, and they sit through the night and their minds are wonderful. I guess no other people have been able to use opium well.”
Lee dampened his tongue in the black brew. “I respectfully submitted my problem to one of these sages, read him the story, and told him what I understood from it. The next night four of them met and called me in. We discussed the story all night long.”
Lee laughed. “I guess it’s funny,” he said. “I know I wouldn’t dare tell it to many people. Can you imagine four old gentlemen, the youngest is over ninety now, taking on the study of Hebrew? They engaged a learned rabbi. They took to the study as though they were children. Exercise books, grammar, vocabulary, simple sentences. You should see Hebrew written in Chinese ink with a brush! The right to left didn’t bother them as much as it would you, since we write up to down. Oh, they were perfectionists! They went to the root of the matter.”
“And you?” said Samuel.
“I went along with them, marveling at the beauty of their proud clean brains. I began to love my race, and for the first time I wanted to be Chinese. Every two weeks I went to a meeting with them, and in my room here I covered pages with writing. I bought every known Hebrew dictionary. But the old gentlemen were always ahead of me. It wasn’t long before they were ahead of our rabbi; he brought a colleague in. Mr. Hamilton, you should have sat through some of those nights of argument and discussion. The questions, the inspection, oh, the lovely thinking—the beautiful thinking.
“After two years we felt that we could approach your sixteen verses of the fourth chapter of Genesis. My old gentlemen felt that these words were very important too—‘Thou shalt’ and ‘Do thou.’ And this was the gold from our mining: ‘Thou mayest.’ ‘Thou mayest rule over sin.’ The old gentlemen smiled and nodded and felt the years were well spent. It brought them out of their Chinese shells too, and right now they are studying Greek.”
Samuel said, “It’s a fantastic story. And I’ve tried to follow and maybe I’ve missed somewhere. Why is this word so important?”
Lee’s hand shook as he filled the delicate cups. He drank his down in one gulp. “Don’t you see?” he cried. “The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?”
“Yes, I see. I do see. But you do not believe this is divine law. Why do you feel its importance?”
“Ah!” said Lee. “I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time. I even anticipated your questions and I am well prepared. Any writing which has influenced the thinking and the lives of innumerable people is important. Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.” Lee’s voice was a chant of triumph.
Adam said, “Do you believe that, Lee?”
“Yes, I do. Yes, I do. It is easy out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, ‘I couldn’t help it; the way was set.’ But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There’s no godliness there. And do you know, those old gentlemen who were sliding gently down to death are too interested to die now?”
Adam said, “Do you mean these Chinese men believe the Old Testament?”
Lee said, “These old men believe a true story, and they know a true story when they hear it. They are critics of truth. They know that these sixteen verses are a history of humankind in any age or culture or race. They do not believe a man writes fifteen and three-quarter verses of truth and tells a lie with one verb. Confucius tells men how they should live to have good and successful lives. But this—this is a ladder to climb to the stars.” Lee’s eyes shone. “You can never lose that. It cuts the feet from under weakness and cowardliness and laziness.”
Adam said, “I don’t see how you could cook and raise the boys and take care of me and still do all this.”
“Neither do I,” said Lee. “But I take my two pipes in the afternoon, no more and no less, like the elders. And I feel that I am a man. And I feel that a man is a very important thing—maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed— because ‘Thou mayest.’”" —John Steinbeck, East of Eden
“Writing is a very silly business at best.” —John Steinbeck, The Art of Fiction No. 45, The Paris Review, Issue 48, Fall 1969
'La pensée est le labeur de l’intelligence, la rêverie en est la volupté [Thought is the labor of intelligence, daydreams in sensuality.' —Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
“Every intellectual effort, be it drama, poem, or romance, must contain three ingredients — what the author has felt, what he has observed, and what he has divined." —Victor Hugo, Introduction to the 1833 edition of “Han d’Islande” (1823)
“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.” — Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
“The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.” —Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
"If there is to be any permanent improvement in man and any better social order, it must come mainly from the education and humanizing of man. I am quite certain that the more the question of crime and its treatment is studied the less faith men have in punishment." —Clarence Darrow, Crime: Its Cause And Treatment
"If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind." —Clarence Darrow, Scopes Monkey Trial
"In Geneva lived Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He too was a rebel, mighty in war. Voltaire was keener, wittier, deeper, greater. Rousseau was more fiery, emotional, passionate. Both were really warriors in the same great cause. From their different places, three miles apart, both sent forth their thunderbolts to wake a sleeping world. When the world awakened and shook itself, churches, thrones, institutions, laws, and customs were buried in the wreck. Some charged the wreck to Voltaire, some to Rousseau." —Clarence Darrow, Voltaire
"That men should ‘turn the other cheek,’ should ‘love their enemies,’ should ‘resist not evil,’ has ever seemed fine to teach to children, to preach on Sundays, to round a period in a senseless oratorical flight; but it has been taken for granted that these sentiments cannot furnish the real foundation for strong characters or great states." —Clarence Darrow, Resist Not Evil
"When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it." —Clarence Darrow
"I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction." —Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life
"Great wars have been followed by an unusually large number of killings between private citizens and individuals. These killers have become accustomed to thinking in terms of slaying and death toward all opposition, and these have been followed in turn by the most outrageous legal penalties and a large increase in the number of executions by the state. It is perfectly clear that hate begets hate, force is met with force, and cruelty can become so common that its contemplation brings pleasure, when it should produce pain." —Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life
"The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick." —Umberto Eco
"Le christianisme a beaucoup fait pour l’amour en en faisant un péché. [Christianity has done a great deal for love by making it a sin]" —Anatole France, Le Jardin d'Épicure
"La souffrance! quelle divine méconnu! Nous lui devons tout ce qu'il ya de bon en nous, tout ce qui donne du prix à la vie; nous lui devons la pitié, nous lui devons le courage, nous lui devons toutes les vertus. [Suffering — how divine it is, how misunderstood! We owe to it all that is good in us, all that gives value to life; we owe to it pity, we owe to it courage, we owe to it all the virtues]" —Anatole France
"S’il fallait absolument choisir, j’aimerais mieux faire une chose immorale qu’une chose cruel. [If it were absolutely necessary to choose, I would rather be guilty of an immoral act than of a cruel one]" —Anatole France
"La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain. [In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread]" —Anatole France
"Pour accomplir de grandes choses il ne suffit pas d'agir il faut rêver; il ne suffit pas de calculer, il faut croire. [To accomplish great things we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe]" —Anatole France
"In every well-governed state, wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing." —Anatole France
"L'innocence, le plus souvent, est un bonheur et non pas une vertu. [Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue]" —Anatole France
"When a thing has been said and well said, have no scruple: take it and copy it." —Anatole France
"The gods conform scrupulously to the sentiments of their worshippers: they have reasons for so doing...Pay attention to this. The spirit which favoured the accession in Rome of the god of Israel was not merely the spirit of the masses, but also that of the philosophers. At that time, they were nearly all Stoics, and believed in one god alone, one on whose behalf Plato had laboured and one unconnected by tie of family or friendship with the gods of human form of Greece and Rome. This god, through his infinity, resembled the god of the Jews. Seneca and Epictetus, who venerated him, would have been the first to have been surprised at the resemblance, had they been called upon to institute a comparison. Nevertheless, they had themselves greatly contributed towards rendering acceptable the austere monotheism of the Judaeo-Christians. Doubtless a wide gulf separated Stoic haughtiness from Christian humility, but Seneca's morals, consequent upon his sadness and his contempt of nature, were paving the way for the Evangelical morals. The Stoics had joined issue with life and the beautiful; this rupture, attributed to Christianity, was initiated by the philosophers. A couple of centuries later, in the time of Constantine, both pagans and Christians will have, so to speak, the same morals and philosophy. The Emperor Julian, who restored to the Empire its old religion, which had been abolished by Constantine the Apostate, is justly regarded as an opponent of the Galilean. And, when perusing the petty treatises of Julian, one is struck with the number of ideas this enemy of the Christians held in common with them. He, like them, is a monotheist; with them, he believes in the merits of abstinence, fasting, and mortification of the flesh; with them, he despises carnal pleasures, and considers he will rise in favour with the gods by avoiding women; finally, he pushes Christian sentiment to the degree of rejoicing over his dirty beard and his black finger-nails. The Emperor Julian's morals were almost those of St. Gregory Nazianzen. There is nothing in this but what is natural and usual. The transformations undergone by morals and ideas are never sudden. The greatest changes in social life are wrought imperceptibly, and are only seen from afar. Christianity did not secure a foothold until such time as the condition of morals accommodated itself to it, and as Christianity itself had become adjusted to the condition of morals. It was unable to substitute itself for paganism until such time as paganism came to resemble it, and itself came to resemble paganism." —Anatole France
“But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and living beings. Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid.” —Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
"The tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes never!" —Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
"'Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal--there's the trick!'" —Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
"Stealing books is a crime, not a sin." —Gabriel García Márquez
"Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.” —Gabriel García Márquez, Love and Other Demons
"She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst, and only then did she discover how much she missed the whiff of oregano on the porch and the smell of the roses at dusk, and even the bestial nature of the parvenus. Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude." —Gabriel García Márquez, Cien Años de Soledad
"It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trails, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore." --Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
“In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.” —Gabriel García Márquez, interview with The Paris Review (The Art of Fiction No. 69), Issue 82, Winter 1981
“Nothing had really changed, but I felt that I wasn’t really looking at the village, but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading. For all practical purposes everything had evolved into literature: the houses, the people, and the memories. I’m not sure whether I had already read Faulkner or not, but I know now that only a technique like Faulkner’s could have enabled me to write down what I was seeing. The atmosphere, the decadence, the heat in the village were roughly the same as what I had felt in Faulkner.” —Gabriel García Márquez, interview with The Paris Review (The Art of Fiction No. 69), Issue 82, Winter 1981
“…if I had to give a young writer some advice I would say to write about something that has happened to him; it’s always easy to tell whether a writer is writing about something that has happened to him or something he has read or been told.” —Gabriel García Márquez, interview with The Paris Review (The Art of Fiction No. 69), Issue 82, Winter 1981
"Men know that women are a overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves." —Samuel Johnson
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." —George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists
“Progress is impossible without change and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” —George Bernard Shaw
"I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold." —George Bernard Shaw, A Splendid Torch
Diary entries
[edit]“It is strange how old traditions, so long buried as one thinks, suddenly crop up again.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 3 January 1915
“…I think patriotism is a base emotion.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 3 January 1915
“I dislike the sight of women shopping. They take it so seriously.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 5 January 1915
“I wrote all the morning, with infinite pleasure, which is queer, because I know all the time that there is no reason to be pleased with what I write, & that in 6 weeks or even days, I shall hate it.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 6 January 1915
“There is a foreign look about a town which stands up against the sunset, & is approached by a much trodden footpath across a field.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 9 January 1915
“At this moment, I feel as if the human race had no character at all—sought for nothing, believed in nothing, & fought only from a dreary sense of duty.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 15 January 1915
“I thought how happy I was, without any of the excitement which, once, seemed to me to constitute happiness…Also about the worthlessness of all human works except as a means of keeping the workers happy. My writing now delights me solely because I love writing & dont [sic], honestly, care a hang what anyone says. What seas of horror one dives through in order to pick up these pearls—however they are worth it.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 16 January 1915
“The day is rather like a leafless tree: there are all sorts of colours in it, if you look closely. But the outline is bare enough.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 29 January 1915
“…the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practise. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses & the stumbles…I believe that during the past year I can trace some increase of ease in my professional writing which I attribute to my casual half hours after tea…I might in the course of time learn what it is that one can make of this loose, drifting material of life; finding another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more consciously & scrupulously, in fiction.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 20 April 1919
“What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, & yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds & ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, & find that the collection has sorted itself & refined itself & coalesced, as such deposits mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, & yet steady, tranquil composed with the aloofness of a work of art.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 20 April 1919
“The main requisite…is not to play the part of censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever…But looseness quickly becomes slovenly. A little effort is needed to face a character or an incident which needs to be recorded.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 20 April 1919
“Indeed living is fairly bare at the moment. I had the rare sensation of its being necessary to eat, in order to support life.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 7 May 1919
“Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over the abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end. But why do I feel this? Now that I say it I don’t feel it.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 25 October 1920
“Melancholy diminishes as I write. Why the don’t I write it down oftener? Well, one’s vanity forbids. I want to appear a success even to myself.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 25 October 1920
“I think too much of whys & wherefores: too much of myself. I dont like time to flap round me.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 25 October 1920
“The peculiar combination of suavity, gravity, malignity & common sense always repels me.”—Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 10 August 1921
“If only one could sip slowly & relish every grain of every hour!” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 11 August 1921
“The develops thing about writing is that it calls upon every nerve to hold itself taut.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 11 August 1921
“Instinctively I want someone to catch my overflow of pleasure.”—Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 11 August 1921
“I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual. I like, I see, to question people about death.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 17 February 1922
“Suppose, I said to myself the other day this pain over my heart suddenly wrung me out like a dish cloth & left me dead?—I was feeling sleepy, indifferent, & calm; & so thought it didn’t much matter...Then, some bird or light I daresay, or waking wider, set me off wishing to live on my own—wishing chiefly to walk along the river & look at things.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 17 February 1922
“How can anyone be such a fool as to believe in anyone?” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 24 March 1922
“There’s no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; & that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 26 July 1922
“There is something maniacal in masculine vanity.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 28 July 1922
“Often, my wisdom teaches me, good resolutions wither because forced. And modern science teaches us to respect pleasure, or that is my reading.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 3 August 1922
“Slowly the cloud withdraws. Not that I can put pen to paper at this moment; but the waters, which that great grampus dislodged, meet together again. I am once more washed by the flood, warm, embracing, fertilising, of my own thoughts. I am too feeble to analyse the psychology, which I guess to be interesting.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 22 August 1922
“The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 22 August 1922
“It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life... one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one’s character, living in the brain.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 22 August 1922
“…I am beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain—how to get the greatest amount of pleasure out of it. The secret is I think always so to contrive that work is pleasant.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 4 October 1922
“Never pretend that children, for instance, can be replaced with other things.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 2 January 1923
“We are busy & attach importance to hours.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 2 January 1923
“But we must not let our hobbies & pleasures become objects of fetish worship. L., I think, suffers from his extreme clarity. He sees things so clear that he can’t swim float & speculate. And now we have such a train attached to us that we have to go on. It is easy, at least, to pretend that pressure is upon us.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 2 January 1923
“I will leave it here, unfinished, a note of interrogation—signifying some mood that recurs, but is not often expressed. One’s life is made up, superficially, of such moods; but they cross a solid substance…” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 2 January 1923
“One must write from deep feeling, said Dostoevsky. And so I? Or do I fabricate with words, loving them as I do? No I think not…I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system & to show it at work, at its most intense— But here I may be posing.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 19 June 1923
“I insubstantise, willfully to some extent, distrusting reality—its cheapness…Have I the power of conveying the true reality? Or do I write essays about myself? Answer the questions as I may, in the uncomplimentary sense, & still there remains this excitement. To get to the bones, now I’m writing fiction again I feel my force flow straight from me at its fullest...free use of the faculties means happiness. I’m better company, more of a human being.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 19 June 1923
“Youth is a matter of forging ahead.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 3 January 1924
“I’ve had some very curious visions in this room too, lying in bed, mad, & singing the sunlight quivering with gold water, on the wall. I’ve heard the voices of the dead here. And felt, through it all, exquisitely happy.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 9 January 1924
“Its a queer thing to come so close to agony as this, & just to be saved oneself.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 5 April 1924
“London is enchanting. I step out upon a tawny coloured magic carpet, it seems, & and get carried into beauty without raising a finger. The nights are amazing, with all the white porticoes & broad silent avenues. And people pop in & out, lightly, divertingly like rabbits; & I look down Southampton Row, wet as a seal’s back or red & yellow with sunshine, & watch the omnibus going & coming, & hear the old crazy organs.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 5 May 1924
“That is the only merit of these parties, that individuals compose differently from what they do in private. One sees groups; gets wholes; general impressions: from the many things being combined.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 18 November 1924
“How quickly society brings one out—or rather others out!” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 21 December 1924
“I don't think I'm ever bored. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say 'This is it'? What is it? And shall I die before I can find it? Then (as I was walking through Russell Square last night) I see mountains in the sky: the great clouds, and the moon which is risen over Persia; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is 'it' – A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there too. Who am I, what am I, and so on; these questions are always floating about in me.” —Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 27 February 1926
“It's not cowardly to wish to live. It's the very reverse of cowardly. Personally, I'd like to go on for a hundred years... Think of all the things that are bound to happen!” —Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in." —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
"Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." —Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction
The Common Reader (1925)
[edit]Montaigne
[edit]“We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to some one opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking and returning to the profound darkness which it has lit up momentarily with a wandering light. Face, voice, and accent eke out our words and impress their feebleness with character in speech. But the pen is a rigid instrument; it can say very little; it has all kinds of habits and ceremonies of its own. It is dictatorial too: it is always making ordinary men into prophets, and changing the natural stumbling trip of human speech into the solemn and stately march of pens.” —Virginia Woolf, Montaigne
“For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.” —Virginia Woolf, Montaigne
“But watch her as she broods over the fire in the inner room of that tower which, though detached from the main building, has so wide a view over the estate. Really she is the strangest creature in the world, far from heroic, variable as a weathercock, “bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal”—in short, so complex, so indefinite, corresponding so little to the version which does duty for her in public, that a man might spend his life merely in trying to run her to earth. The pleasure of the pursuit more than rewards one for any damage that it may inflict upon one’s worldly prospects.” —Virginia Woolf, Montaigne
“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream. Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.” —Virginia Woolf, Montaigne
“All extremes are dangerous. It is best to keep in the middle of the road, in the common ruts, however muddy. In writing choose the common words; avoid rhapsody and eloquence—yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.” —Virginia Woolf, Montaigne
“We may enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life and speak the real language. There is certainly an element of truth in that. Things are said very finely at the lower end of the table. There are perhaps more of the qualities that matter among the ignorant than among the learned. But again, what a vile thing the rabble is! “the mother of ignorance, injustice, and inconstancy. Is it reasonable that the life of a wise man should depend upon the judgment of fools?” Their minds are weak, soft and without power of resistance. They must be told what it is expedient for them to know. It is not for them to face facts as they are. The truth can only be known by the well-born soul—“l’âme bien née”.” —Virginia Woolf, Montaigne
“Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order.” —Virginia Woolf, Montaigne
“…“perhaps” and “I think” and all those words which qualify the rash assumptions of human ignorance. Such words help one to muffle up opinions which it would be highly impolitic to speak outright. For one does not say everything; there are some things which at present it is advisable only to hint. One writes for a very few people, who understand.” —Virginia Woolf, Montaigne
“We must dread any eccentricity or refinement which cuts us off from our fellow-beings. Blessed are those who chat easily with their neighbours about their sport or their buildings or their quarrels, and honestly enjoy the talk of carpenters and gardeners. To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province.” —Virginia Woolf, Montaigne
“Such wonders there are in the world; halcyons and undiscovered lands, men with dogs’ heads and eyes in their chests, and laws and customs, it may well be, far superior to our own. Possibly we are asleep in this world; possibly there is some other which is apparent to beings with a sense which we now lack.” —Virginia Woolf, Montaigne
“Communication is health; communication is truth; communication is happiness. To share is our duty; to go down boldly and bring to light those hidden thoughts which are the most diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends to let them know it.” —Virginia Woolf, Montaigne
“We should start without any fixed idea where we are going to spend the night, or when we propose to come back; the journey is everything.” —Virginia Woolf, Montaigne
“…we should try to find before we start some man of our own sort who will go with us and to whom we can say the first thing that comes into our heads. For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.” —Virginia Woolf, Montaigne
“As for the risks—that we may catch cold or get a headache—it is always worthwhile to risk a little illness for the sake of pleasure.” —Virginia Woolf, Montaigne
"For ourselves, who are ordinary men and women, let us return thanks to Nature for her bounty by using every one of the senses she has given us; vary our state as much as possible; turn now this side, now that, to the warmth, and relish to the full before the sun goes down the kisses of youth and the echoes of a beautiful voice singing Catullus. Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and the most common actions—a walk, a talk, solitude in one’s own orchard—can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind. Beauty is everywhere, and beauty is only two finger’s-breadth from goodness." —Virginia Woolf, Montaigne
“But enough of death; it is life that matters.” —Virginia Woolf, Montaigne
“It is life that becomes more and more absorbing as death draws near, one’s self, one’s soul, every fact of existence: that one wears silk stockings summer and winter; puts water in one’s wine; has one’s hair cut after dinner; must have glass to drink from; has never worn spectacles; has a loud voice; carries a switch in one’s hand; bites one’s tongue; fidgets with one’s feet; is apt to scratch one’s ears; likes meat to be high; rubs one’s teeth with a napkin (thank God, they are good!); must have curtains to one’s bed; and, what is rather curious, began by liking radishes, then disliked them, and now likes them again. No fact is too little to let it slip through one’s fingers, and besides the interest of facts themselves there is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.“ —Virginia Woolf, Montaigne
“Observe how the soul is always casting her own lights and shadows; makes the substantial hollow and the frail substantial; fills broad daylight with dreams; is as much excited by phantoms as by reality; and in the moment of death sports with a trifle. Observe, too, her duplicity, her complexity. She hears of a friend’s loss and sympathises, and yet has a bitter-sweet malicious pleasure in the sorrows of others. She believes; at the same time she does not believe. Observe her extraordinary susceptibility to impressions, especially in youth. A rich man steals because his father kept him short of money as a boy. This wall one builds not for oneself, but because one’s father loved building. In short, the soul is all laced about with nerves and sympathies which affect her every action, and yet, even now in 1580, no one has any clear knowledge—such cowards we are, such lovers of the smooth conventional ways—how she works or what she is except that of all things she is the most mysterious, and one’s self the greatest monster and miracle in the world…” —Virginia Woolf, Montaigne
The Russian Point of View
[edit]"We are souls, tortured, unhappy souls, whose only business it is to talk, to reveal, to confess, to draw up at whatever rending of flesh and nerve those crabbed sins which crawl on the sand at the bottom of us. But, as we listen, our confusion slowly settles. A rope is flung to us; we catch hold of a soliloquy; holding on by the skin of our teeth, we are rushed through the water; feverishly, wildly, we rush on and on, now submerged, now in a moment of vision understanding more than we have ever understood before, and receiving such revelations as we are wont to get only from the press of life at its fullest." —Virginia Woolf, The Russian Point of View
"Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher's face and the butcher a poet's; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the mast-head ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon; Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer 'Yes'; if we are truthful we say 'No'; nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us—a piece of a policeman's trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra's wedding veil—but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread." —Virginia Woolf, Orlando
"Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?” —Virginia Woolf, Orlando
"For if it is rash to walk into a lion’s den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St Paul’s, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet. A poet is Atlantic and lion in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us. If we survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can destroy illusions is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life —(and so on for six pages if you will, but the style is tedious and may well be dropped).”—Virginia Woolf, Orlando
“...as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely than lust or gunpowder. The poet’s, then, is the highest office of all…” —Virginia Woolf, Orlando
“The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it—a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!” —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
"A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning." —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
“There is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect … for one would not part with it oneself, or take it, against his will, from one’s husband, without losing one’s independence, one’s self-respect—something, after all, priceless.” —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
“She didn’t know their names, but friends she knew they were, friends without names, songs without words, always the best.” —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
"Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.” ―Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
“A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter.” —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
“Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years…of thinking by the body of the people.” —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
“Life for both sexes...is...a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything...it calls for confidence in oneself….And how can we generate this...most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority—it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose...—over other people….when Z, most...modest of men...exclaimed, “The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!”...was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
The Death of the Moth, and other essays (1930)
[edit]The Death of the Moth
[edit]“The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.” —Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth
Three Pictures
[edit]“It is impossible that one should not see pictures; because if my father was a blacksmith and yours was a peer of the realm, we must needs be pictures to each other. We cannot possibly break out of the frame of the picture by speaking natural words. You see me leaning against the door of the smithy with a horseshoe in my hand and you think as you go by: “How picturesque!” I, seeing you sitting so much at your ease in the car, almost as if you were going to bow to the populace, think what a picture of old luxurious aristocratical England! We are both quite wrong in our judgments no doubt, but that is inevitable.” —Virginia Woolf, Three Pictures (June 1929)
Old Mrs. Grey
[edit]“So we — humanity — insist that the body shall still cling to the wire. We put out the eyes and the ears; but we pinion it there, with a bottle of medicine, a cup of tea, a dying fire, like a rook on a barn door; but a rook that still lives, even with a nail through it.” —Virginia Woolf, Old Mrs. Grey (1933)
Street Haunting
[edit]“The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930)
“How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured. Here vaguely one can trace symmetrical straight avenues of doors and windows; here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them.” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930)
“The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930)
“How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness, and on one side of it perhaps some tree-sprinkled, grass-grown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally and, as one passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all round them, an owl hooting, and far away the rattle of a train in the valley. But this is London, we are reminded; high among the bare trees are hung oblong frames of reddish yellow light — windows; there are points of brilliance burning steadily like low stars — lamps; this empty ground, which holds the country in it and its peace, is only a London square, set about by offices and houses where at this hour fierce lights burn over maps, over documents, over desks where clerks sit turning with wetted forefinger the files of endless correspondences; or more suffusedly the firelight wavers and the lamplight falls upon the privacy of some drawing-room, its easy chairs, its papers, its china, its inlaid table, and the figure of a woman, accurately measuring out the precise number of spoons of tea which —— She looks at the door as if she heard a ring downstairs and somebody asking, is she in?” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930)
“For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty; like a butterfly it seeks colour and basks in warmth. On a winter’s night like this, when nature has been at pains to polish and preen herself, it brings back the prettiest trophies, breaks off little lumps of emerald and coral as if the whole earth were made of precious stone. The thing it cannot do (one is speaking of the average unprofessional eye) is to compose these trophies in such a way as to bring out the more obscure angles and relationships. Hence after a prolonged diet of this simple, sugary fare, of beauty pure and uncomposed, we become conscious of satiety. We halt at the door of the boot shop and make some little excuse, which has nothing to do with the real reason, for folding up the bright paraphernalia of the streets and withdrawing to some duskier chamber of the being where we may ask, as we raise our left foot obediently upon the stand: “What, then, is it like to be a dwarf?”” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930)
“With no thought of buying, the eye is sportive and generous; it creates; it adorns; it enhances. Standing out in the street, one may build up all the chambers of an imaginary house and furnish them at one’s will with sofa, table, carpet. That rug will do for the hall. That alabaster bowl shall stand on a carved table in the window. Our merrymaking shall be reflected in that thick round mirror. But, having built and furnished the house, one is happily under no obligation to possess it; one can dismantle it in the twinkling of an eye, and build and furnish another house with other chairs and other glasses.” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930)
“Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? Circumstances compel unity; for convenience sake a man must be a whole. The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with scepticism and solitude. When he opens his door, he must run his fingers through his hair and put his umbrella in the stand like the rest.” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930)
“Here we find anchorage in these thwarting currents of being; here we balance ourselves after the splendours and miseries of the streets. The very sight of the bookseller’s wife with her foot on the fender, sitting beside a good coal fire, screened from the door, is sobering and cheerful.” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930)
“Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us.” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930)
“Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930), The Death of the Moth, and other essays
“Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world. There is always a hope, as we reach down some grayish-white book from an upper shelf, directed by its air of shabbiness and desertion, of meeting here with a man who set out on horseback over a hundred years ago to explore the woollen market in the Midlands and Wales; an unknown traveller, who stayed at inns, drank his pint, noted pretty girls and serious customs, wrote it all down stiffly, laboriously for sheer love of it (the book was published at his own expense); was infinitely prosy, busy, and matter-of-fact, and so let flow in without his knowing it the very scent of hollyhocks and the hay together with such a portrait of himself as gives him forever a seat in the warm corner of the mind’s inglenook. One may buy him for eighteen pence now. He is marked three and sixpence, but the bookseller’s wife, seeing how shabby the covers are and how long the book has stood there since it was bought at some sale of a gentleman’s library in Suffolk, will let it go at that.” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930)
“Thus, glancing round the bookshop, we make other such sudden capricious friendships with the unknown and the vanished whose only record is, for example, this little book of poems, so fairly printed, so finely engraved, too, with a portrait of the author. For he was a poet and drowned untimely, and his verse, mild as it is and formal and sententious, sends forth still a frail fluty sound like that of a piano organ played in some back street resignedly by an old Italian organ-grinder in a corduroy jacket. There are travellers, too, row upon row of them, still testifying, indomitable spinsters that they were, to the discomforts that they endured and the sunsets they admired in Greece when Queen Victoria was a girl. A tour in Cornwall with a visit to the tin mines was thought worthy of voluminous record.” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930), The Death of the Moth, and other essays
“The number of books in the world is infinite, and one is forced to glimpse and nod and move on after a moment of talk, a flash of understanding, as, in the street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime.” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930), The Death of the Moth, and other essays
“But the main stream of walkers at this hour sweeps too fast to let us ask such questions. They are wrapt, in this short passage from work to home, in some narcotic dream, now that they are free from the desk, and have the fresh air on their cheeks. They put on those bright clothes which they must hang up and lock the key upon all the rest of the day, and are great cricketers, famous actresses, soldiers who have saved their country at the hour of need. Dreaming, gesticulating, often muttering a few words aloud, they sweep over the Strand and across Waterloo Bridge whence they will be slung in long rattling trains, to some prim little villa in Barnes or Surbiton where the sight of the clock in the hall and the smell of the supper in the basement puncture the dream.” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930)
“Spread out behind the rod of duty we see the whole breadth of the river Thames — wide, mournful, peaceful. And we see it through the eyes of somebody who is leaning over the Embankment on a summer evening, without a care in the world. Let us put off buying the pencil; let us go in search of this person — and soon it becomes apparent that this person is ourselves. For if we could stand there where we stood six months ago, should we not be again as we were then — calm, aloof, content? Let us try then. But the river is rougher and greyer than we remembered.” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930)
“The sights we see and the sounds we hear now have none of the quality of the past; nor have we any share in the serenity of the person who, six months ago, stood precisely were we stand now.” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930)
“It is only when we look at the past and take from it the element of uncertainty that we can enjoy perfect peace.” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930)
“And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930)
“That is true: to escape is the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the greatest of adventures.” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930)
“Still as we approach our own doorstep again, it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round; and the self, which has been blown about at so many street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many inaccessible lanterns, sheltered and enclosed.” —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (1930)
“Twelfth Night” at the Old Vic
[edit]“Shakespeareans are divided, it is well known, into three classes; those who prefer to read Shakespeare in the book; those who prefer to see him acted on the stage; and those who run perpetually from book to stage gathering plunder.” —Virginia Woolf, “Twelfth Night” at the Old Vic (1933)
“Certainly there is a good deal to be said for reading Twelfth Night in the book if the book can be read in a garden, with no sound but the thud of an apple falling to the earth, or of the wind ruffling the branches of the trees. For one thing there is time — time not only to hear “the sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets” but to unfold the implications of that very subtle speech as the Duke winds into the nature of love. There is time, too, to make a note in the margin; time to wonder at queer jingles like “that live in her; when liver, brain, and heart” . . . “and of a foolish knight that you brought in one night” and to ask oneself whether it was from them that was born the lovely, “And what should I do in Illyria? My brother he is in Elysium.”” —Virginia Woolf, “Twelfth Night” at the Old Vic (1933)
“For Shakespeare is writing, it seems, not with the whole of his mind mobilized and under control but with feelers left flying that sort and play with words so that the trail of a chance word is caught and followed recklessly. From the echo of one word is born another word, for which reason, perhaps, the play seems as we read it to tremble perpetually on the brink of music.” —Virginia Woolf, “Twelfth Night” at the Old Vic (1933)
“The printed word is changed out of all recognition when it is heard by other people. We watch it strike upon this man or woman; we see them laugh or shrug their shoulders, or tum aside to hide their faces. The word is given a body as well as a soul. Then again as the actors pause, or topple over a barrel, or stretch their hands out, the flatness of the print is broken up as by crevasses or precipices; all the proportions are changed. Perhaps the most impressive effect in the play is achieved by the long pause which Sebastian and Viola make as they stand looking at each other in a silent ecstasy of recognition. The reader’s eye may have slipped over that moment entirely. Here we are made to pause and think about it; and are reminded that Shakespeare wrote for the body and for the mind simultaneously.” —Virginia Woolf, “Twelfth Night” at the Old Vic (1933)
“The fault may lie partly with Shakespeare. It is easier to act his comedy than his poetry, one may suppose, for when he wrote as a poet he was apt to write too quick for the human tongue. The prodigality of his metaphors can be flashed over by the eye, but the speaking voice falters in the middle.” —Virginia Woolf, “Twelfth Night” at the Old Vic (1933)
“The mind in reading spins a web from scene to scene, compounds a background from apples falling, and the toll of a church bell, and an owl’s fantastic flight which keeps the play together.” —Virginia Woolf, “Twelfth Night” at the Old Vic (1933)
The Humane Art
[edit]“The letter writer is no surreptitious historian. He is a man of short range sensibility; he speaks not to the public at large but to the individual in private. All good letter writers feel the drag of the face on the other side of the age and obey it — they take as much as they give.” —Virginia Woolf, The Humane Art (1940)
Not One of Us
[edit]“But, unfortunately, though one may make bodies and institutions look absurd, it is extremely difficult to make private men and women look anything so simple. Human relationships are too complex; human nature is too subtle.” —Virginia Woolf, Not One of Us, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays
Not One of Us
[edit]“The alliance of the intense belief of genius with the easy-going non-belief or compromise of ordinary humanity must, it seems, lead to disaster and to disaster of a lingering and petty kind in which the worst side of both natures is revealed.”—Virginia Woolf, Not One of Us, The Death of the Moth and other Essays
Henry James: 2. The Old Order
[edit]“All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the great general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of separate excellence.”—Virginia Woolf, Henry James: 2. The Old Order, The Death of the Moth and other Essays
Craftsmanship
[edit]“If we insist on forcing them against their nature to be useful, we see to our cost how they mislead us, how they fool us, how they land us a crack on the head. We have been so often fooled in this way by words, they have so often proved that they hate being useful, that it is their nature not to express one simple statement but a thousand possibilities — they have done this so often that at last, happily, we are beginning to face the fact.” —Virginia Woolf, Craftsmanship, The Death of the Moth and other Essays
“Such is the suggestive power of words that they will often make a bad book into a very lovable human being, and a good book into a man whom we can hardly tolerate in the room.”—Virginia Woolf, Craftsmanship, The Death of the Moth and other Essays
“There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems more lovely than the Ode to A Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.”—Virginia Woolf, Craftsmanship, The Death of the Moth and other Essays
“[Words live] Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid.”—Virginia Woolf, Craftsmanship, The Death of the Moth and other Essays
“We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die.”—Virginia Woolf, Craftsmanship, The Death of the Moth and other Essays
“…words, like ourselves, in order to live at their ease, need privacy. Undoubtedly they like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious. Our unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light. . . . That pause was made, that veil of darkness was dropped, to tempt words to come together in one of those swift marriages which are perfect images and create everlasting beauty.”—Virginia Woolf, Craftsmanship, The Death of the Moth and other Essays
A Letter to a Young Poet (1932)
[edit]“The art of writing, and that is perhaps what my malcontent means by “beauty,” the art of having at one’s beck and call every word in the language, of knowing their weights, colours, sounds, associations, and thus making them, as is so necessary in English, suggest more than they can state, can be learnt of course to some extent by reading — it is impossible to read too much; but much more drastically and effectively by imagining that one is not oneself but somebody different. How can you learn to write if you write only about one single person?”—Virginia Woolf, A Letter to a Young Poet (1932), The Death of the Moth and Other Essays
“Can you doubt that the reason why Shakespeare knew every sound and syllable in the language and could do precisely what he liked with grammar and syntax, was that Hamlet, Falstaff and Cleopatra rushed him into this knowledge; that the lords, officers, dependants, murderers and common soldiers of the plays insisted that he should say exactly what they felt in the words expressing their feelings? It was they who taught him to write, not the begetter of the Sonnets.”—Virginia Woolf, A Letter to a Young Poet (1932), The Death of the Moth and Other Essays
I. The Window
[edit]“Since he belonged…to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests…” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“…life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness…one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure.” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited by men.” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“But the number of men who make a definite contribution to anything whatsoever is very small…” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend on great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now than in the time of the Pharaohs? Is the lot of the average human being, however, he asked himself, the criterion by which we judge the measure of civilisation? Possibly not. Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a slave class. The liftman in the Tube is an eternal necessity. The thought was distasteful to him…to avoid it, he would find some way of snubbing the predominance of the arts..the world exists for the average human being; that the arts are merely a decoration imposed on the top of human life; they do not express it: Nor is Shakespeare necessary to it.” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“It was his power, his gift, suddenly to shed all superfluities, to shrink and diminish so that he looked barer and felt sparer, even physically, yet lost none of his intensity of mind, and so to stand on his little ledge facing the dark of human ignorance, on his little ledge facing the dark of human ignorance, how we know nothing and the sea eats away the ground we stand on—that was his fate, his gift.” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“Directly one looked up and saw them, what she called “being in love” flooded them. They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the universe seen through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birds sang through them. And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too,…and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain. So it was indeed. The world by all means should have shared, it…such a rapture—for by what other name could one call it?” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“…this “rapture”, this silent stare, for which she felt intense gratitude, for nothing so solaced her, eased her of the perplexity of life, and miraculously raised its burdens, as this sublime power, this heavenly gift, and one would no more disturb it, while it lasted, than break up the shaft of sunlight, lying level across the floor.
That people should love like this,…was helpful, was exalting.” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes ethrealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral. Of all that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained.” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably?” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge…” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“How then…did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which were people.” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“For days there hung about her, as after a dream some subtle change is felt in the person one has dreamt of, more vividly than anything she said, the sound of murmuring and, as she sat in the wicker arm-chair in the drawing-room window she wore, to Lily’s eyes, an august shape; the shape of a dome.” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband.” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through it all.” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“For that reason, knowing what was before them—love and ambition and being wretched alone in dreary place—she had often the feeling, Why must they grow up and lose it all? And then she said to herself, brandishing her sword at life, Nonsense. They will be perfectly happy.” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“‘And that’s the end,’ she said, and she saw in his eyes, as the interest of the story died away in them, something else take its place; something wondering, pale, like the reflection of a light, which at once made him gaze and marvel. Turning, she looked across the bay, and there, sure enough, coming regularly across the waves first two quick strokes and then one long steady stroke, was the light of the Lighthouse. It had been lit.” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“No…children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed.” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, wit a sense of solemnity to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others…and this self having shed it attachments was free for the strangest adventures.” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she…must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it. They could not stop it, she thought, exulting. There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability. Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience...but as a wedge of darkness. Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet the stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at—that light, for example. And it would lift up on it some little phrase or other which had been lying in her mind like that—"Children don't forget, children don't forget"—which she would repeat and begin adding to it, It will end, it will end, she said. It will come, it will come, when suddenly she added, We are in the hands of the Lord." —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
"It was odd...how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself. There rose, and she looked and looked with her needles suspended, there curled off the floor of the mind, rose from the lake of one's being, a mist, a bride to meet her lover." —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
"There is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit...no happiness lasted…”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
"Always...one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly by laying hold of some little odd or end, some sound, some sight."—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“She was lovely, livelier now than ever...but he could not speak to her. He could not interrupt her...She was aloof from him now in her beauty, in her sadness. He would let her be, and he passed her without a word, though it hurt him that she should look so distant, and he could not reach her, he could do nothing to help her…For he wishes, she knew, to protect her.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“…Lily Briscoe reflected, perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly discontented with one’s own work.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“We can’t all be Titians and we can’t all by Darwins, he said; at the same time he doubted whether you could have your Darwin and your Titian if it weren’t for humble people like ourselves.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“For one’s children so often gave one’s own perceptions a little thrust forwards.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“Like all feelings felt for oneself…it made one sad.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
"'It's odd that one scarcely gets anything worth having by post, yet one always wants one's letters.'"—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“…life being now strong enough to bear her on again, she began all this business, as a sailor not without weariness again and thinks how, had the ship sunk, he would have whirled round and round and found rest on the floor of the sea.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“Lily Briscoe watched her drifting into that strange no-man’s land where to follow people is impossible and yet their going inflicts such a chill on those who watch them that they always try at least to follow them with their eyes as one follows a fading ship until the sails have sunk beneath the horizon.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“…it was one of those misjudgments of hers that seemed to be instinctive and to arise from some need of her own rather than of other people’s.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“There was some quality which she herself had not, some lustre, some richness, which attracted him, amused him, led him to make favourites of girls like Minta.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“…he seemed a young man; a man very attractive to women, not burdened, not weighed down with the greatness of his labours and the sorrows of the world and his fame or his failure, but again as she had first known him, gaunt but gallant…”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
"What passes for cookery in England is an abomination."—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“…from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this—love…This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“There it was, all round them. It partook…of eternity; as she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“Here, she felt,…was the still space that lies about the heart of things, where one could move or rest; could wait now…listening; could then, like a hawk which lapses suddenly from its high station, flaunt and sink on laughter easily, resting her whole weight upon what at the other end of the table her husband was saying about the square root of one thousand two hundred and fifty-three.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“It could not last, she knew, but at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling. So she saw them; she heard them; but whatever they said had also this quality, as if what they said was like the movement of a trout when, at the same time, one can see the ripple and the gravel, something to the right, something to the left; and the whole is held together; for whereas in active life she would be netting and separating one thing from another; she would be saying she liked the Waverly novels or had not read them; she would be urging herself forward; now she said nothing. For the moment, she hung suspended.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“Then Minta Doyle, whose instinct was fine, said bluffly, absurdly, that she did not believe that any one really enjoyed reading Shakespeare. Mr. Ramsay said grimly (but his mind was turned away again) that very few people liked it as much as they said they did. But, he added, there is considerable merit in some of the plays nevertheless…”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“The faintest light was on her face, as if the glow of Minta opposite, some excitement, some anticipation of happiness was reflected in her, as if the sun of the love of men and women rose over the rim of the table-cloth, and without knowing what it was she bent towards it and greeted it.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“It was necessary now to carry everything a step further. With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“She felt rather inclined just for a moment to stand still after all that chatter, and pick out one particular thing; the thing that mattered; to detach it; separate it off; clean it of all the emotions and odds and ends of things, and so hold it before her, and bring it to the tribunal where, ranged about in conclave, sat the judges she had set up to decide these things. Is it good, is it bad, is it right or wrong? Where are we all going to? and so on. So she righted herself after the shock of the event, and quite unconsciously and incongruously, used the branches of the elm trees outside to help her to stabilise her position. Her world was changing: they were still. The event had given her a sense of movement. All must be in order.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“They would, she thought, going on again, however long they lived, come back to this night; this moon; this wind; this house: and to her too. It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven; and this, and this, and this, she thought, going upstairs, laughing, but affectionately, at the sofa on the landing (her mother's); at the rocking-chair (her father's); at the map of the Hebrides.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“…she felt, with her hand on the nursery door, that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically (the feeling was one of relief and happiness) it was all one stream, and chairs, tables, maps, were hers, were theirs, it did not matter whose, and Paul and Minta would carry it on when she was dead.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“Their eyes met for a second; but they did not want to speak to each other. They had nothing to say, but something seemed, nevertheless, to go from him to her. It was the life, it was the power of it, it was the tremendous humour, she knew, that made him slap his thighs. Don't interrupt me, he seemed to be saying, don't say anything; just sit there. And he went on reading. His lips twitched. It filled him. It fortified him.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
II. Time Passes
[edit]“But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted; solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen. Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions—“Will you fade? Will you perish?”—scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which clouds for ever turn and shadows form, dreams persisted, and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to declare (but if questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules; or to resist the extraordinary stimulus to range hither and thither in search of some absolute good, some crystal of intensity, remote from the known pleasures and familiar virtues, something alien to the processes of domestic life, single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the sand, which would render the possessor secure. Moreover, softened and acquiescent, the spring with her bees humming and gnats dancing threw her cloak about her, veiled her eyes, averted her head, and among passing shadows and flights of small rain seemed to have taken upon her a knowledge of the sorrows of mankind.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
III. The Lighthouse
[edit]“What does it mean then, what can it all mean?”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“Here was Lily, at forty-four, wasting her time, unable to do a thing, standing there, playing at painting, playing at the one thing one did not play at, and it was all Mrs. Ramsay's fault. She was dead. The step where she used to sit was empty. She was dead.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“And, resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which traversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general question which was apt to particularise itself at such moments as these, when she released faculties that had been on the strain, stood over her, paused over her, darkened over her. What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.” —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“She was glad…to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren't things spoilt then… by saying them? Aren't we more expressive thus?”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“But the dead…oh, the dead!…one pitied them, one brushed them aside, one had even a little contempt for them. They are at our mercy.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“But beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty—it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life—froze it. One forgot the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or shadow, which made the face unrecognisable for a moment and yet added a quality one saw for ever after. It was simpler to smooth that all out under the cover of beauty.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. "About life, about death; about Mrs. Ramsay”—no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there?…It was one's body feeling, not one's mind. The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant. To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have—to want and want—how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“…so much depends…upon
distance: whether people are near us or far from us…”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“She must try to get hold of something that evaded her. It evaded her when she thought of Mrs. Ramsay; it evaded her now when she thought of her picture. Phrases came. Visions came. Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything. Get that and start afresh; get that and start afresh; she said desperately, pitching herself firmly again before her easel. It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine,…the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“Let it come,… if it will come. For there are moments when one can neither think nor feel. And if one can neither think nor feel, …where is one?”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“They only mumbled at each other on staircases; they looked up at the sky and said it will be fine or it won't be fine. But this was one way of knowing people,…to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple down into the distant heather.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“One must keep on looking without for a second relaxing the intensity of emotion, the determination not to be put off, not to be bamboozled. One must hold the scene—so— in a vise and let nothing come in and spoil it. One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.”—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“I recover my continuity, as he reads. I become a figure in the procession, a spoke in the huge wheel that turning, at last erects me, here and now. I have been in the dark; I have been hidden; but when the wheel turns (as he reads) I rise into this dim light where I just perceive, but scarcely, kneeling boys, pillars and memorial brasses. There is no crudity here, no sudden kisses.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Louis
“There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph. Only, when I have lain alone on the hard ground, watching you play your game, I begin to feel the wish to be singled out; to be summoned, to be called away by one person who comes to find me, who is attracted towards me, who cannot keep himself from me, but comes to where I sit on my gilt chair, with my frock billowing round me like a flower. And withdrawing into an alcove, sitting alone on a balcony we talk together.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Jinny
“I shall be a clinger to the outsides of words all my life.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Neville
“He will marry and there will be scenes of tenderness at breakfast.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Neville
“I must open the little trap-door and let out these linked phrases in which I run together whatever happens, so that instead of incoherence there is perceived a wandering thread, lightly joining one thing to another.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Bernard
“Now, too, the time is coming when we shall leave school and wear long skirts. I shall wear necklaces and a white dress without sleeves at night. There will be parties in brilliant rooms; and one man will single me out and will tell me what he has told no other person…He will find in me some quality, some peculiar thing. But I shall not let myself be attached to one person only. I do not want to be fixed, to be pinioned. I tremble, I quiver, like the leaf in the hedge, as I sit dangling my feet, on the edge of the bed, with a new day to break open. I have fifty years, I have sixty years to spend. I have not yet broken into my hoard. This is the beginning.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Jinny
“It leaves me, now that it has fallen, here in the passage rather shivering. Things seem paler. I will go now into the library and take out some book, and read and look; and read again and look. Here is a poem about a hedge. I will wander down it and pick flowers, green cowbind and the moonlight-coloured May, wild roses and ivy serpentine. I will clasp them in my hands and lay them on the desk's shiny surface. I will sit by the river's trembling edge and look at the water-lilies, broad and bright, which lit the oak that overhung the hedge with moonlight beams of their own watery light. I will pick flowers; I will bind flowers in one garland and clasp them and present them--Oh! to whom? There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the centre resists. Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent. Now the stream pours in a deep tide fertilizing, opening the shut, forcing the tight-folded, flooding free. To whom shall I give all that now flows through me, from my warm, my porous body? I will gather my flowers and present them--Oh! to whom?
Sailors loiter on the parade, and amorous couples; the omnibuses rattle along the sea front to the town. I will give; I will enrich; I will return to the world this beauty. I will bind my flowers in one garland and advancing with my hand outstretched will present them--Oh! to whom?” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Rhoda
“Oblivious, almost entirely ignorant, he will pass from my life. And I shall pass, incredible as it seems, into other lives; this is only an escapade perhaps, a prelude only.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Neville
“Wind and storm coloured July. Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when, holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather, I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Rhoda
“With intermittent shocks, sudden as the springs of a tiger, life emerges heaving its dark crest from the sea. It is to this we are attached; it is to this we are bound, as bodies to wild horses. And yet we have invented devices for filling up the crevices and disguising these fissures.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Rhoda
“I go vaguely, to make money vaguely.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Neville
“The human voice has a disarming quality--(we are not single, we are one).” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Bernard
“Every hour something new is unburied in the great bran pie. What am I? I ask. This? No, I am that. Especially now, when I have left a room, and people talking, and the stone flags ring out with my solitary footsteps, and I behold the moon rising, sublimely, indifferently, over the ancient chapel--then it becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many. Bernard, in public, bubbles; in private, is secretive. That is what they do not understand, for they are now undoubtedly discussing me, saying I escape them, am evasive. They do not understand that I have to effect different transitions; have to cover the entrances and exits of several different men who alternately act their parts as Bernard. I am abnormally aware of circumstances. I can never read a book in a railway carriage without asking, Is he a builder? Is she unhappy? I was aware today acutely that poor Simes, with his pimple, was feeling, how bitterly, that his chance of making a good impression upon Billy Jackson was remote. Feeling this painfully, I invited him to dinner with ardour. This he will attribute to an admiration which is not mine. That is true. But "joined to the sensibility of a woman" (I am here quoting my own biographer) "Bernard possessed the logical sobriety of a man." Now people who make a single impression, and that, in the main, a good one (for there seems to be a virtue in simplicity), are those who keep their equilibrium in mid-stream. (I instantly see fish with their noses one way, the stream rushing past another.) Canon, Lycett, Peters, Hawkins, Larpent, Neville--all fish in mid-stream. But you understand, you, my self, who always comes at a call (that would be a harrowing experience to call and for no one to come; that would make the midnight hollow, and explains the expression of old men in clubs--they have given up calling for a self who does not come), you understand that I am only superficially represented by what I was saying tonight. Underneath, and, at the moment when I am most disparate, I am also integrated. I sympathize effusively; I also sit, like a toad in a hole, receiving with perfect coldness whatever comes. Very few of you who are now discussing me have the double capacity to feel, to reason. Lycett, you see, believes in running after hares; Hawkins has spent a most industrious afternoon in the library. Peters has his young lady at the circulating library. You are all engaged, involved, drawn in, and absolutely energized to the top of your bent--all save Neville, whose mind is far too complex to be roused by any single activity. I also am too complex. In my case something remains floating, unattached.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Bernard
“How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one's friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one's self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Neville
“I describe all this in such a way that, centred as you are upon some private sorrow (for a hooded shape presides over our encounter), you give way, you laugh and delight in me. My charm and flow of language, unexpected and spontaneous as it is, delights me too. I am astonished, as I draw the veil off things with words, how much, how infinitely more than I can say, I have observed. More and more bubbles into my mind as I talk, images and images. This, I say to myself, is what I need; why, I ask, can I not finish the letter that I am writing? For my room is always scattered with unfinished letters. I begin to suspect, when I am with you, that I am among the most gifted of men. I am filled with the delight of youth, with potency, with the sense of what is to come. Blundering, but fervid, I see myself buzzing round flowers, humming down scarlet cups, making blue funnels resound with my prodigious booming. How richly I shall enjoy my youth (you make me feel).” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Bernard
“You are not listening. You are making some protest, as you slide, with an inexpressibly familiar gesture, your hand along your knee. By such signs we diagnose our friends' diseases.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Bernard
“…I am trying to expose a secret told to nobody yet; I am asking you (as I stand with my back to you) to take my life in your hands and tell me whether I am doomed always to cause repulsion in those I love?” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Neville
“I would rather be loved, I would rather be famous than follow perfection through the sand.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Neville
“How strange to feel the line that is spun from us lengthening its fine filament across the misty spaces of the intervening world.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Bernard
“We are not simple as our friends would have us to meet their needs. Yet love is simple.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Bernard
“The swallow dips her wing in dark pools. But here the door opens and people come; they come towards me. Throwing faint smiles to mask their cruelty, their indifference, they seize me. The swallow dips her wings; the moon rides through the blue seas alone. I must take his hand; I must answer. But what answer shall I give? I am thrust back to stand burning in this clumsy, this ill-fitting body, to receive the shafts of his indifference and his scorn, I who long for marble columns and pools on the other side of the world where the swallow dips her wings.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Rhoda
“I hate all details of the individual life. But I am fixed here to listen. An immense pressure is on me. I cannot move without dislodging the weight of centuries. A million arrows pierce me. Scorn and ridicule pierce me. I, who could beat my breast against the storm and let the hail choke me joyfully, am pinned down here; am exposed. The tiger leaps. Tongues with their whips are upon me. Mobile, incessant, they flicker over me. I must prevaricate and fence them off with lies. What amulet is there against this disaster? What face can I summon to lay cool upon this heat?” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Rhoda
“I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Rhoda
“She dreads us, she despises us, yet comes cringing to our sides because for all our cruelty there is always some name, some face, which sheds a radiance, which lights up her pavements and makes it possible for her to replenish her dreams.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Louis
“It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to the rescue--the penalty of living in an old civilization with a notebook.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Bernard
“Time, which is a sunny pasture covered with a dancing light, time, which is widespread as a field at midday, becomes pendant. Time tapers to a point. As a drop falls from a glass heavy with some sediment, time falls.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Bernard
“I have lost friends, some by death…others through sheer inability to cross the street.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Bernard
“I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found that story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Bernard
“Yet sometimes I am sick of natural happiness, and fruit growing, and children scattering the house with oars, guns, skulls, books won for prizes and other trophies. I am sick of the body, I am sick of my own craft, industry and cunning, of the unscrupulous ways of the mother who protects, who collects under her jealous eyes at one long table her own children, always her own.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Susan
“Life has been a terrible affair for me. I am like some vast sucker, some glutinous, some adhesive, some insatiable mouth.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Louis
“I am not a single and passing being. My life is not a moment's bright spark like that on the surface of a diamond. I go beneath ground tortuously, as if a warder carried a lamp from cell to cell. My destiny has been that I remember and must weave together, must plait into one cable the many threads, the thin, the thick, the broken, the enduring of our long history, of our tumultuous and varied day. There is always more to be understood; a discord to be listened for; a falsity to be reprimanded.“ —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Louis
“The crystal, the globe of life as one calls it, far from being hard and cold to the touch, has walls of thinnest air. If I press them all will burst.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Bernard
“Nevertheless, life is pleasant, life is tolerable. Tuesday follows Monday; then comes Wednesday. The mind grows rings; the identity becomes robust; pain is absorbed in growth. Opening and shutting, shutting and opening, with increasing hum and sturdiness, the haste and fever of youth are drawn into service until the whole being seems to expand in and out like the mainspring of a clock. How fast the stream flows from January to December! We are swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shadow. We float, we float…” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Bernard
“This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion, Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Bernard
“Lord, how unutterably disgusting life is! What dirty tricks it plays us, one moment free; the next, this. Here we are among the breadcrumbs and the stained napkins again. That knife is already congealing with grease. Disorder, sordidity and corruption surround us.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Bernard
“It is strange that we, who are capable of so much suffering, should inflict so much suffering.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Bernard
“How much better is silence; the coffee-cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.” ― Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Bernard
“What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Bernard
"So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless." —Upton Sinclair, on Les Misérables
"Only the dead have seen the end of war." —George Santayana
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." —George Santayana
“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.” —Søren Kierkegaard
"When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation." —Jorge Luis Borges
"Paradise is a library, not a garden." —Jorge Luis Borges
“…all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.” —Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones, The Garden of Forking Paths
“To sleep is to be abstracted from the world;…to think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.” —Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones; Funes, the Memorious
“What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all. For that reason a disobedience committed in a garden contaminates the human race; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew suffices to save it.” —Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones, The Form of the Sword
“unreality…is the necessary condition of art.” —Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones, The Secret Miracle
“…man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal [the cat] lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.” —Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones, Sur
"On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people." "Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy." "I did," said Ford. "It is." "So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?" "It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want." "You mean they actually vote for the lizards?" "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course." "But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?" "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?" —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
"The major problem - one of the major problems - for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of who you get to do it. Or, rather, of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarise: it is a well-known and much lamented fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarise the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made president should, on no account, be allowed to do the job. To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem." —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
"It requires a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions—by the government, by the people, by every businessman or labor leader, and by every newspaper. For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence—on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed." —John F. Kennedy
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." —John F. Kennedy
"We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right." —Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Don't try to save humanity all at once. Try saving one person. It is a lot harder. To help one person without harming another is very difficult. That's where the temptation to save all of humanity comes from." —Dmitri Shostakovich
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” ― David Foster Wallace
“If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one, though he must be careful to contain his regret at the changes within definite limits: admitting that the magnificence and prosperity of the metropolis Maurilia, when compared to the old, provincial Maurilia, cannot compensate for a certain lost grace, which, however, can be appreciated only now in the old post cards, whereas before, when that provincial Maurilia was before one’s eyes, one saw absolutely nothing graceful and would see it even less today, if Maurilia had remaied unchanged; and in any case the metropolis has the added attraction that, through what it has become, one can look back with nostalgia at what it once was.” —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.” —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“For everyone, sooner or later, the day comes when we bring our gaze down along the drainpipes and we can no longer detach it from the cobblestones.” —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. ‘But which is the stone that supports the bridge?' Kublai Khan asks. ‘The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,' Marco answers, ‘but by the line of the arch that they form.’ Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: 'Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.’ Polo answers: ‘Without stones there is no arch.’” —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“Your footsteps follow not what is outside the arches, but what is within, buried, erased. If, of two arcades, one continues to seem more joyous, it is because thirty years ago a girl went by there, with broad, embroidered sleeves, or else it is only because that arcade catches the light at a certain hour like that other arcade, you cannot recall where.” —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“‘The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constance vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.’” —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
"Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist." —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
"The purpose of art is [to wash] the dust of daily life off our souls." —Pablo Picasso
"It is not what the artist does that counts, but what he is.”
—Pablo Picasso
“Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot; others transform a yellow spot into the sun" —Pablo Picasso
“Do you ever know what the birds are singing? You don’t. But you listen to them anyway.” —Pablo Picasso
"Darkness isn't the opposite of light, it is simply its absence." —Terry Pratchett
"I tell them stars have never hurt me, I wish I could say the same about people." —Terry Pratchett
"There's nothing more terrible than someone out to do the world a favour." —Terry Pratchett
“No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away—until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.” —Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
“We are guilty of many errors and many faults, but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer ‘Tomorrow,’ his name is today.” —Gabriela Mistral, Su Nombre es Hoy
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." —Frederick Douglass
"Architecture is the frame of life. It is the nature and substance of whatever is." —Frank Lloyd Wright.
“True happiness is not expensive; if it costs dear, then it is of inferior nature.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“After being born, I know of no greater misfortune than that of giving birth to a human being.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“The whole of our life is spent wandering around our grave; our various illnesses are so many puffs of wind which bring us a little or a great deal nearer port.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“Death is beautiful, and she is our friend; yet we do not recognize her, because she appears to us in a mask and her mask terrifies us.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“Brothers of one great family, children lose their common features only when they lose their innocence, which is the same everywhere. Then the passions, modified by climates, governments, and customs, create different nations; the human species ceases to speak and understand the same language; society is the real Tower of Babel.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“…man offers less resistance to the storms than the monuments raised by his hands.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“…hours do not suspend their flight; it is not man that stops time, it is time that stops man.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“In my eyes murder will never be an object of admiration or an argument for freedom; I know of nothing more servile, contemptible, cowardly, and stupid than a terrorist.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“Moments of crisis produce a reduplication of life in men. In a society which is dissolving and reforming, the struggle of two geniuses, the clash between past and future, and the mixture of old customs and new form a transitory amalgam which does not leave a moment for boredom. Passions and characters, set at liberty, display themselves with an energy which they do not possess in the well-regulated state. The breaches of the laws, the emancipation from duties, customs, and properties, and even the dangers of everyday life all add to the interest of this disorder. The human race perambulates the streets in holiday mood, having got rid of its schoolmasters and returned for a moment to a state of nature, and does not begin to feel the need for social restraint again until it bears the yoke of the new tyrants engendered by license.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“Every night, as he lies down to rest, a man can count his losses: only his years never leave him, although they pass one by one; when he reviews them and calls their numbers, they reply: ‘Present!’ Not a single one is absent from the roll-call.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“…there is virtue in the gaze of a great man.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“In 1792, fidelity to one’s oath was still held to be a duty; today, it has become so rare that it is regarded as a virtue.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“Into relationships formed in the midst of one’s career there enters a certain melancholy; when two people do not meet at the very outset, the memories of the beloved are not mingled with that part of one’s life when one breathed without knowing her: those days, which belong to other company, are painful to the memory and as it were distinct from one’s existence.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“When there is a disproportion of age, the drawbacks increase; the older of the two began life before the younger was born; the younger is destined to remain alone in his turn: one has walked in a solitude this side of a cradle, while the other will cross a solitude that side of a tomb; the past was a desert for the first, and the future will be a desert for the second.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“It is difficult to be in love in all the circumstances that produce happiness: youth, beauty, opportunity, taste, character, grace, and age.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“…love needs only permanence to be at once an Eden before the Fall and a Hosanna without end. See to it that beauty lasts, that youth endures, that the heart never wearies, and you reproduce heaven.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“Love is so surely the supreme happiness that it is haunted by the illusion of perpetuity; it pronounces only irrevocable vows; in the absence of joy, it tries to make sorrow eternal; a fallen angel, it still speaks the language it spoke in the incorruptible abode; its hope is that it may never die; in its twofold nature and its twofold illusion on this earth it endeavours to perpetuate itself by immortal thought and inexhaustible generation.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“The places where I had wandered, the times in question, and the words which I had exchanged with Charlotte, were engraved in my memory: I saw the smile of the wife who had been destined for me; I respectfully touched her black tresses; I pressed her lovely arms against my breast, like a chain of lilies which I might wear ‘round my neck. No sooner was I in some secluded spot than Charlotte, with her white hands, came to sit beside me. I divined her presence, as at night one breathes the perfume of flowers one cannot see…
There is not a common, a road, or a church within thirty miles of London that I have not visited. The most deserted places, a field of nettles, a ditch planted with thistles, anything that was neglected by men, became favourite spots for me, and in those spots Byron already breathed. Resting my head on my hand, I gazed at the despised places; when their painful impression affected me too deeply, the memory of Charlotte came to delight me: as such moments I was like the pilgrim who, reaching a solitude within view of the rocks of Mount Sinai, heard a nightingale sing.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“There began a series of those Do you remember? questions which bring back a whole lifetime. At each Do you remember? we looked at one another, trying to discover in each other’s faces those traces of time which measure so cruelly the distance from the starting-point and the length of the road that has been travelled.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“By what miracle does man agree to do what he must to on earth, he who is doomed to die?” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“Our lives resemble those fragile buildings shored up in the sky by flying buttresses; the latter do not crumble all at once, but collapse one after another; they go on supporting some gallery when they have already abandoned the sacrarium and the cradle of the edifice.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“Let us be gentle if we would be regretted: great genius and superior qualities are mourned only by the angels.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“When posterity admires unreservedly, it is shocked that the contemporaries of the man it admires should not have the same opinion of that man as itself. This is easy to explain, however: the things which caused offense in that person are past; his infirmities have died with him; all that remains of him is his imperishable life; but the evil which he caused is nonetheless real for all that; evil in itself and in its essence, and evil above all for those who endured it.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“Extraordinary individuals are the monuments of the human mind; they are not its rule.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“…men of that nature must leave their memoirs to be recounted by the unknown voice which belongs to nobody and which issues from the nations and the centuries. Only we humble folk may talk of ourselves, for otherwise nobody would talk of us.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“I am weary of my survival. Ah, if only I possessed the indifference of one of those old longshore Arabs that I met in Africa. Sitting cross-legged on a little rope mat, their heads wrapped in their burnous, they while away their last hours in following with their eyes, in the azure of the sky, the beautiful flamingo flying over the ruins of Carthage; lulled by the murmur of the waves, they have forgotten their own existence and sing in a low voice a song of the sea: they are going to die.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“When a man looks at the vessel of his past life, he seems to see on a deserted sea the wake of a vessel that has vanished; he seems to hear the tolling of a bell whose old tower is lost from sight.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“What hostile power cuts and wastes our days in this fashion, ironically lavishing them on all the indifferent relationships called attachments, on all the paltry pleasures known as joys? Then, as a further mockery, when it has blighted and spent the most precious part of your life, it brings you back to your point of departure. And how does it bring you back? With your mind filled with strange ideas, importunate ghosts, and disappointed or incomplete notions of a world which has given you no lasting happiness. These ideas, these ghosts, these notions come between you and what happiness you might still enjoy. You return with your heart ravaged by regrets and grieved by these youthful errors which are so painful to the memory in mature and modest years.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“Prosperity does not recognize her sister Adversity. Thus do illusions, shattered for one, begin again for one another; thus do the fickly destinies of human life pass each other on the windswept waves: happy or baleful, the same abyss carries them and engulfs them.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“The old bird falls from the branch where it has taken refuge; it leaves life for death. Carried away by the current, in has only changed one stream for another.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“As education reaches down to the lower classes, the latter gradually discover the secret canker which gnaws away at this irreligious social order. The excessive disproportion of conditions and fortunes was endurable as long as it remained concealed; but as soon as this disproportion was generally perceived, the old order received its death-blow. Recompense the aristocratic fictions, if you can; try to convince the poor man, once he has learnt to read and ceased to believe, once he has become as well informed as yourself; try to convince him that he must submit to every sort of privation, while his neighbour possesses a thousand times what he needs: as a last resource you will have to kill him.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“As I say these last words, my window, which looks west over the gardens of the Foreign Missions, is open: it is six o’clock in the morning; I can see the pale and swollen moon; it is sinking over the spire of the Invalides scarcely touched by the first golden ray from the east: one might imagine that the old world was ending and the new beginning. I behold the light of a dawn whose sunrise I shall never see. It only remains for me to sit down at the edge of my grave: then I shall descend boldly, crucifix in hand, into eternity.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoirs d’Outre-Tombe
“When, in the silence of abjection, no sound can be heard save that of the chains of the slave and the voice of the informer; when all tremble before the tyrant, and it is as dangerous to incur his favour as to merit his displeasure, the historian appears, entrusted with the vengeance of the nations.” —François-René de Chateaubriand, article in Le Mercure
“Whenever there remains a chance for fortune, there is no heroism in trying it; magnanimous actions are those whose foreseeable result is adversity and death. After all, what do reverses matter if our name, pronounced by posterity, makes a single generous heart beat two thousand years after we have lived?” —François-René de Chateaubriand, article in Le Mercure
“My life is casting its last light, like a lamp which has burnt out in the darkness of a long night, and which sees the breaking of the dawn in which it is to die.” —Lucile de Chateaubriand, letter to François-René de Chateaubriand
“If I recall the past, I frankly confess, my dear, that it is to revive the image of myself in your heart.” —Lucile de Chateaubriand, letter to François-René de Chateaubriand
“Where are my friends, my protectors and my riches? Who cares about my life, that life abandoned by all and weighing down entirely on itself?” —Lucile de Chateaubriand, letter to François-René de Chateaubriand
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things." —Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.” —Henry David Thoreau, Walden
"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it." — Henry David Thoreau
"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." —Thomas Jefferson
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." —Susan B. Anthony
"But real adventures...do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad." —James Joyce, Dubliners, An Encounter
"Jesus Christ was not a hard taskmaster. He understood our little failings, understood the weakness of our poor fallen nature, understood the temptations of this life. We might have had, we all had from time to time, our temptations: we might have, we all had, our failings. But one thing only...he would ask of his hearers. And that was: to be straight and manly with God. If their accounts tallied in every point to say:
—Well, I have verified my accounts. I find all well.
But if, as might happen, there were some discrepancies, to admit the truth, to be frank and say like a man:
—Well, I have looked into my accounts. I find this wrong and also this wrong. But, with God's grace, I will rectify this and this. I will set right my accounts." —James Joyce, Dubliners, Grace
“A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round it shin and beside this was a round of spiced beef. Between these rival ends ran parallel lines of side-dishes: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam, a large green leaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle, on which lay bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds, a companion dish on which lay a solid rectangle of Smyrna figs, a dish of custard topped with grated nutmeg, a small bowl full of chocolates and sweets wrapped in gold and silver papers and a glass vase in which stood some tall celery stalks. In the centre of the table there stood, as sentries to a fruit-stand which upheld a pyramid of oranges and American apples, two squat old-fashioned decanters of cut glass, one containing port and the other dark sherry. On the closed square piano a pudding in a huge yellow dish lay in waiting and behind it were three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals, drawn up according to the colours of their uniforms, the first two black, with brown and red labels, the third and smallest squad white, with tranverse green sashes.” —James Joyce, Dubliners, The Dead
“It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. . . . Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” —James Joyce, Dubliners; The Dead
"The word was beautiful: wine. It made you think of dark purple because the grapes were dark purple that grew in Greece outside homes like white temples." —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
"You are an artist... the object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question." —James Joyce, Ulysses
"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery." —James Joyce, Ulysses
“I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.
Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it.
—Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly.
She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively” —James Joyce, Ulysses
“—Bill, sir? she said, halting. Well, it's seven mornings a pint at twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling and one and two is two and two, sir.” —James Joyce, Ulysses
"I resent violence and intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due instalments plan. It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate." —James Joyce, Ulysses
“People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be. The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother.” —James Joyce, Ulysses
“say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” —James Joyce, Ulysses
"Loonely in me loneness. For all their faults. I am passing out. O
bitter ending! I'll slip away before they're up. They'll never see.
Nor know. Nor miss me. And it's old and old it's sad and old it's
sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad
father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere
size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me
seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them
rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo
moremens more. So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me.
All. But one clings still. I'll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff!
So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you
done through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now
under whitespread wings like he'd come from Arkangels, I sink
I'd die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes,
tid. There's where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush
to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us
then. Finn, again! Take. Bussofthee, mememormee! Till thous-
endsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a
long the”
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
"Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt. We show no more mercy to the affection that reveals its utmost extent than we do to another kind of prodigal who has not a penny left." —Honoré de Balzac, Pére Goriot
“‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’
‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.
‘I don’t much care where—’ said Alice.
‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.
‘—so long as I get somewhere,’ Alice added as an explanation.
‘Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cat, ‘if you only walk long enough.’” —Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
"Ah, Alice. We can't go home again. No surprise really. Only a very few find the way, and most of them don't recognize it when they do. Delusions, too, die hard with memory. Only the savage regard the endurance of pain as the measure of worth. Forgetting pain is convenient, remembering it: agonizing. But recovering the truth is worth the suffering and our Wonderland, though damaged, is safe in memory... for now.” —Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean-- neither more nor less." —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
"To dwell is to garden." —Martin Heidegger
“That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.” —J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
"I have learned much in my life from books and out of them about love." —William Carlos Williams; Asphodel, That Greeny Flower
" It is difficult to get the news from poems
- yet men die miserably every day
- for lack
- yet men die miserably every day
of what is found there." —William Carlos Williams; Asphodel, That Greeny Flower
"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'--that is all
ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." —John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
'I love you the more in that I believe you have liked me for my own sake and for nothing else. I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel.’ —John Keats, letter to Fanny Brawne 8 July 1819
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated..." —John Donne, Meditation 17
“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” —John Donne
“Great symphonies require more than one hearing; great poems more than one reading.” —Florence Earle Coates
"To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature." —Auguste Rodin
"The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has." —Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
“Fairies, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.”
—William Butler Yeats, “The Land of Heart's Desire”
"These are the clouds about the fallen sun,
The majesty that shuts his burning eye:
The weak lay hand on what the strong has done,
Till that be tumbled that was lifted high
And discord follow upon unison,
And all things at one common level lie.
And therefore, friend, if your great race were run
And these things came, so much the more thereby
Have you made greatness your companion,
Although it be for children that you sigh:
These are the clouds about the fallen sun,
The majesty that shuts his burning eye."
—William Butler Yeats, "These are the Clouds"
"A poet writes always out of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria." --William Butler Yeats, A General Introduction for My Work
"What was it that the poets promised you,
If it was not their sorrow?" --William Butler Yeats, Seanchan, The Kingdom of Sorrow
If Not, Winter (Carson 2002)
[edit]"Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot
and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing
on the black earth. But I say it is
what you love.
Easy to make this understood by all.
For she who overcame everyone
in beauty (Helen)
left her fine husband
behind and went sailing to Troy.
Not for her children nor her dear parents
had she a thought, no–
]led her astray
]for
]lightly
]reminded me now of Anaktoria
who is gone." —Sappho, Fragment 16, trans. Anne Carson
“He seems to me equal to gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing—oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me
no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me.
But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty” —Sappho, Fragment 31, trans. Anne Carson
"you came and I was crazy for you
and you cooled my mind that burned with longing" —Sappho, Fragment 48, trans. Anne Carson
"For the man who is beautiful is beautiful to see
but the good man will at once also beautiful be." —Sappho, Fragment 50, trans. Anne Carson
“I would not think to touch the sky with two arms.” —Sappho, Fragment 52, trans. Anne Carson
"I simply want to be dead.
Weeping she left me
with many tears and said this:
Oh how badly things have turned out for us.
Sappho, I swear, against my will I leave you.
And I answered her:
Rejoice, go and
remember me. For you know how we cherished you.
But if not, I want
to remind you
]and beautiful things we had.
For many crowns of violets
and roses
]at my side you put on
and many woven garlands
made of flowers
around your soft throat.
And with sweet oil
costly
you anointed yourself
and on a soft bed
delicate
you would let loose your longing
and neither any [ ] nor any
holy place not
was there from which we were absent
no grove [ ] no dance
]no sound
[" —Sappho, Fragment 94, trans. Anne Carson
"Sweet mother I cannot work the loom
I am broken with longing for a boy by slender Aphrodite" —Sappho, Fragment 102, trans. Anne Carson
"as the sweetapple reddens on a high branch
high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot—
no, not forgot: were unable to reach" —Sappho, Fragment 105a, trans. Anne Carson
"like the hyacinth in the mountains that shepherd men
with their feet trample down and on the ground the purple flower" —Sappho, Fragment 105c, trans. Anne Carson
"but I am not someone who likes to wound
rather I have a quiet mind" —Sappho, Fragment 120, trans. Anne Carson
"may you sleep on the breast of your delicate friend" —Sappho, Fragment 126, trans. Anne Carson
“stand to face me beloved
and open out the grace of your eyes” —Sappho, Fragment 138, trans. Anne Carson
"someone will remember us
I say
even in another time" —Sappho, Fragment 147, trans. Anne Carson
"wealth without virtue is no harmless neighbour
but a mixture of both attains the height of happiness" —Sappho, Fragment 148, trans. Anne Carson
“far more sweetsounding than a lyre
golder than gold” —Sappho, Fragment 156, trans. Anne Carson
"with anger spreading in the chest
to guard against a vainly barking tongue" —Sappho, Fragment 158, trans. Anne Carson
"“That's the duty of the old...to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.”" —Phillip Pullman, the Librarian, Northern Lights, Part One: Oxford; Ch. 2: The Idea of North
""We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not...or die of despair."" —Phillip Pullman, Serafina Pekkala, Northern Lights, Part Three: Svalbard; Ch. 18: Fog and Ice
""If we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn't feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the Aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It's worth being cold for that."" —Phillip Pullman, Serafina Pekkala, Northern Lights, Part Three: Svalbard; Ch. 18: Fog and Ice
""When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn’t."" —Phillip Pullman, Serafina Pekkala, Northern Lights, Part Three: Svalbard; Ch. 18: Fog and Ice
""But you cannot change what you are, only what you do."" —Phillip Pullman, Serafina Pekkala, Northern Lights, Part Three: Svalbard; Ch. 18: Fog and Ice
““The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all.”” —Phillip Pullman, Mary Malone, The Amber Spyglass, Ch. 33: Marzipan
“"Good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that's an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.”” —Phillip Pullman, Mary Malone, The Amber Spyglass, Ch. 33: Marzipan
""All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity."" —Phillip Pullman, Serafina Pekkala, The Amber Spyglass, Ch. 36: The Broken Arrow
""Wisdom has had to work in secret, whispering her words, moving like a spy through the humble places of the world while the courts and palaces are occupied by her enemies."" —Phillip Pullman, Serafina Pekkala, The Amber Spyglass, Ch. 36: The Broken Arrow
““Memory's a poor thing to have.”” —Phillip Pullman, Will Parry, The Amber Spyglass, Ch. 37: The Dunes
““Where we are is always the most important place.”” —Phillip Pullman, Lyra Silvertongue (Belacqua), The Amber Spyglass, Ch. 38: The Botanic Garden
"We never know how high we are
- Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,
- Our statures touch the skies—
The Heroism we recite
- Would be a daily thing,
Did not ourselves the Cubits warp
- For fear to be a King—"
—Emily Dickinson
“We never know we go—when we are going
We jest and shut the door—
Fate following behind us bolts it
And we accost no more.” —Emily Dickinson
"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.” —Aldous Huxley, Case of Voluntary Ignorance, Collected Essays
"There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves; it is not my nature. My attachments are always excessively strong." —Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
“And sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in.” — Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility.
"Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.” —Henry James, Theory of Fiction: Henry James
"Well, I'm going to change, now," said Newman. "I don't mean that I am going to be indelicate; but I'm going to go back to where I began. I am back there. I have been all round the circle. Or rather, I have never been away from here. I have never ceased to want what I wanted then. Only now I am more sure of it, if possible; I am more sure of myself, and more sure of you. I know you better, though I don't know anything I didn't believe three months ago. You are everything—you are beyond everything—I can imagine or desire. You know me now; you must know me. I won't say that you have seen the best—but you have seen the worst. I hope you have been thinking all this while. You must have seen that I was only waiting; you can't suppose that I was changing. What will you say to me, now? Say that everything is clear and reasonable, and that I have been very patient and considerate, and deserve my reward. And then give me your hand. Madame de Cintre do that. Do it."
—Henry James, The American
““Well, say to wait for—to have to meet, to face, to see suddenly break out in my life; possibly destroying all further consciousness, possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all my world and leaving me to the consequences, however they shape themselves.” She took this in, but the light in her eyes continued for him not to be that of mockery. “Isn’t what you describe perhaps but the expectation—or at any rate the sense of danger, familiar to so many people—of falling in love?”” — Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle
“It was always open to him to accuse her of seeing him but as the most harmless of maniacs, and this, in the long run—since it covered so much ground—was his easiest description of their friendship. He had a screw loose for her but she liked him in spite of it and was practically, against the rest of the world, his kind wise keeper, unremunerated but fairly amused and, in the absence of other near ties, not disreputably occupied.” — Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle
“He felt in these days what, oddly enough, he had never felt before, the growth of a dread of losing her by some catastrophe—some catastrophe that yet wouldn’t at all be the catastrophe: partly because she had almost of a sudden begun to strike him as more useful to him than ever yet, and partly by reason of an appearance of uncertainty in her health, co-incident and equally new.“ — Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle
“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” ― C.S. Lewis
“There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” —Vincent van Gogh
“What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?” — Vincent van Gogh
“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.” — Vincent van Gogh
“Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all.” — Vincent van Gogh
“I don’t know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream.” — Vincent van Gogh
“I would rather die of passion than of boredom.” —Vincent van Gogh
“Good the judgement of a father,
Better still, a mother's counsel,
Best of all one's own decision.”
— Rune III. Wainamoinen and Youkahainen, compiled by Elias Lonrröt
“A mighty flame follows a tiny spark.” ― Dante Alighieri
"It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Letter 7
"That something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.” —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Letter 7
"Love is good, too, love being difficult.” —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Letter 7
"For one human being to love another, that is the most difficult of all our tasks…" — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Letter 7
"Modern people have learned all too well how to keep our emotions in check, and we know how to mask them with humor or irony. Music has a singular capacity to unlock those controls and bring us face to face with our raw, uncensored and unattenuated feelings." —John Adams
“So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
"There's no limit to the different kinds of feelings music can make you have...every once in a while we have feelings so deep and so special that we have no words for them and that's where music is so marvelous; because music names them for us, only in notes instead of in words. It's all in the way music moves...and that movement can tell us more about the way we feel than a million words can.” — Leonard Bernstein, Young People's Concerts: "What Does Music Mean", 18 January 1958
"You can never have too much passion in what you write or what you perform. The real question is how that passion is controlled, how it’s channeled, and where it leads." —Leonard Bernstein
"The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed...because people are changed by art - enriched, ennobled, encouraged - they then act in a way that may affect the course of events...by the way they vote, they behave, the way they think." —Leonard Bernstein
"There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter.” —Jack London, The Call of The Wild
"To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.” —Hermann Melville, Moby-Dick
“...beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the starry Cetus.” — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
“How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends.” —Hermann Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 10, A Bosom Friend, Paragraph 10
"Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth." —Hermann Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 29, Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb. Paragraph 10
“Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely?” —Hermann Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 112, The Blacksmith. Paragraph 5
“So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me.” —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 127, The Deck. Paragraph 23
"The theater-goer in conventional dramatic theater says: Yes, I've felt that way, too. That's the way I am. That's life. That's the way it will always be. The suffering of this or that person grips me because there is no escape for him. That's great art — Everything is self-evident. I am made to cry with those who cry, and laugh with those who laugh. But the theater-goer in the epic theater says: I would never have thought that. You can't do that. That's very strange, practically unbelievable. That has to stop. The suffering of this or that person grips me because there is an escape for him. That's great art — nothing is self-evident. I am made to laugh about those who cry, and cry about those who laugh.” —Bertold Brecht, Entertainment or Education?
"Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life." —Bertold Brecht, Pelages Vlasova, The Mother
"Zeige ihnen einen roten Kometenschweif, jage ihnen eine dumpfe Angst ein, und sie werden aus ihren Häusern laufen und sich die Beine brechen. Aber sage ihnen einen vernünftigen Satz und beweise ihn mit sieben Gründen, und sie werden dich einfach auslachen” — Bertold Brecht
"Love is what makes you smile when you’re tired." — Paulo Coelho
“You don’t need to explain your dreams. They belong to you.” —Paulo Coelho
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“Two souls are sometimes created together and in love before they’re even born.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
“I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald
“One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.” — Margaret Mead
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." —Margaret Mead
"Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness - And Wilderness is Paradise now." —The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, trans. Edmund Fitzgerald
“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.” ― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
"Comparison is the thief of joy." —Theodore Roosevelt
"It is sad not to love, but it is much sadder not to be able to love." —Miguel de Unamuno
"Until death it is all life." —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
“Violoncellos...are essentially melodic instruments; their tone on the upper strings is one of the most expressive in the entire orchestra. Nothing is so melancholy, nothing is so suitable to rendering tender, languishing melodies, as a mass of violoncellos playing unisono on the highest string.” —Hector Berlioz
“I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
“I would just like to be where you are; I would just like to trust you and love you and be with you. Only with you. Inside of you, around you, in all conceivable and inconceivable places. I would like to be where you are.” —Frida Kahlo, The Diary Of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait.
"I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best. " - Frida Kahlo
“I don’t give a shit what the world thinks. I was born a bitch, I was born a painter, I was born fucked. But I was happy in my way. You did not understand what I am. I am love. I am pleasure, I am essence, I am an idiot, I am an alcoholic, I am tenacious. I am; simply I am…You are a shit.” —Frida Kahlo, from an unsent letter to Diego Rivera
"Art is the most beautiful of all lies. “ —Claude Debussy
“It is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch me.” —Sylvia Plath
"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart; I am, I am, I am." —Sylvia Plath
"If I waited until I felt like writing, I’d never write at all."—Anne Tyler
"I have found that if you love life, life will love you back..." —Arthur Rubinstein
"He who loves not wine, women and song remains a fool his whole life long.” —Martin Luther
"If you start blaming folk for saving lives, what will you do with those who do real harm or damage?" —Terence, Sosia, Andria
"I'm no good at riddles, sir; my name's Davos, not Oedipus." —Terence, Davos, Andria
"It doesn't take much to tip the balance either way when a man's in two minds." —Terence, Mysis, Andria
"If you can't have what you want, do try to want what you can have." —Terence, Byrria, Andria
“Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto [I am human, and I think nothing of which is human is alien to me].” —Terence, Heauton Timoruenos, 67
"And what is a kiss, when all is done?
A promise given under seal—a vow
Taken before the shrine of memory—
A signature acknowledged—a rosy dot
Over the i of Loving—a secret whispered
To listening lips apart—a moment made
Immortal, with a rush of wings unseen—
A sacrament of blossoms, a new song
Sung by two heart to an old simple tune—
The ring of one horizon around two souls
Together, all alone!" —Edmund Rostand, Cyrano, Cyrano de Bergerac
"The human race is pretty uniform. Most people spend the bulk of their time working for a living, and the little bit of leisure they have left bothers them so, that they seek every means of getting rid of it." —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Lieden des jungen Werthers
"Sometimes I tell myself: "Your destiny is unique; count others fortunate—no one else has ever been tortured this way." Then I read an ancient author, and I feel as if I were looking into my own heart...Ah, were people before me already so miserable?" —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Lieden des jungen Werthers
"So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it." --Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
""The universe...makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid."" —Charles Dickens, Mr Jarndyce, Bleak House
"In the deserted harbour there is yet water that laps against the quays. In the dark and silent forest there is a leaf that falls. Before the polished panelling the white ant eats away the wood. Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools." —Alan Paton; Cry, the Beloved Country
“The Judge does not make the law. It is people that make the law. Therefore if a law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the law, that is justice, even if it is not just.”
―Alan Paton; Cry, the Beloved Country
“Because human lives are…composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence…into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life…. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress… While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs…but if they meet when they are older…their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.” —Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.” —e e cummings
“listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go” — e e cummings, ‘pity this busy monster, manunkind’
“For what is it to die,
But to stand in the sun and melt into the wind?” — Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
“Time is the longest distance between two points.” — Tennessee Williams, Tom Wingfield, The Glass Menagerie
“Whoever you are, I have always depended on kindness of strangers.” — Tennessee Williams, Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire
“War is inconsistent with the prosperity of a modern state.” — James Steuart
“…it is utopian to try to differentiate one kind of inhuman behaviour from another.” — Frantz Fanon; Black Skin, White Masks
“Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by such slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity or ruin.” —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
"Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock." — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
“We are always striving for things forbidden
and coveting those denied us.” —Ovid
“There must be a kind of painting totally free of the dependence on the figure—or object—which, like music, illustrates nothing, tells no story, and launches no myth. Such painting would simply evoke the incommunicable kingdoms of the spirit, where dream becomes thought, where line becomes existence.” — Michel Seuphor
“Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.” ― Willa Cather, My Ántonia
“I suppose that most of the people I chance to pass in the street also feel...like a flagless army fighting a hopeless war.”—Fernando Pessoa (trans. Bernardo Soares)
“We worship perfection because we can’t have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.” —Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
“Invadam deos
et cuncta quatiam.
(I will storm the gods
and shiver all things.)” —Seneca, Medea 424-4
“Amplius. In societate humana hoc est maxime necessarium ut sit amicitia inter multos. (Morover, in human society it is of the utmost necessity that there be friendship among many people.)” —Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 3, Chapter 125, That Matrimony Should Not Take Place Between Close Relatives, Paragraph 6.
"But genuine, complete aesthetic pleasure occurs when we grasp the reasons for the harmony, the various ways in which it is realized, and all of its most intricate inner workings." —Thomas Aquinas, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas
Iseult Grandjean
[edit]"Einen Menschen erkunden wie eine Karte, sein Leben durchkreuzen wie ein fremdes Land. Und immer das bleiben: ein Fremder. Einer, der besichtigt, ohne Teil davon zu werden; der Mauern berührt, ohne sie abzureißen und Türen immer zweimal öffnet. Einer, der am Ende immer geht. Zurückkehrt. Und der sich mehr an das fremde Gebiet erinnert als das Gebiet an ihn; das Gebiet hat kein Gedächtnis.
(To explore a person like a map, to cross his life like a foreign country. And always remain that: a stranger. One who visits without being part of it; one who climbs walls but never tears them down and opens doors always twice. One who always leaves in the end, always returns. And who will forever remember the foreign region more than the region remembers him: a territory has no memory.)" — Iseult Grandjean, Das Gebiet hat kein Gedächtnis (pub. shortlist for the competition Text and the City in astikos Verlag)
"To consider aesthetic judgements ‘subjective’ and nothing else is a cliché whose meaning is vague and indefinite but whose function is unambiguous: it serves the purpose of rendering reflection and rational justification unnecessary. The cliché thus belongs, in the word of Francis Bacon, to the idols of indolence. Whoever refers to it feels justified in insisting on his own judgement without letting himself be diverted by arguments which might imperil the premises of the judgement. Individual particular taste, which in general is not at all individual but rather a reflex of group norms, appears as the highest authority against which there is no appeal.
Arguments based on objective facts become suspect as offering not a foundation but merely an illustration of aesthetic judgement, which passes for one’s feeling. Rationality appears as a secondary factor, as an addition or decoration. Skepticism, however, which fancies itself sovereign, is rather empty. Distrust itself deserves distrust…
…one must distinguish the origin, the genesis, of an aesthetic judgement from its legitimation. There is no denying that subjective judgement provides the psychological premise and point of departure for the discovery of rational explanation, but this does not exclude that reason, nor subjective reaction, decides whether the judgement is valid or not." — Karl Dalhaus, Analysis and Value Judgement
“Hae pulcherrimae effigies et mansurae
[these are the most beautiful memorials, the ones that last.]” — Tiberius, edit Tacitus, trans. Olivia Thompson at livelatin
"Art is timeless and art is larger than ourselves. Art can instill a sense of hope in the world." –Carmen Bambach, Curator of the Met
“…an operation [eating] which is performed two or three times a day, and the purpose of which is to sustain life, surely merits all our care.” —Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Animula Vagula Blandula
“Wine initiates us into the volcanic mysteries of the soil…”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Animula Vagula Blandula
“Water drunk more reverently still [than wine], from the hands or from the spring itself, diffuses within us the most secret salt of earth and the rain of heaven.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Animula Vagula Blandula
“…I have learned the advantage for the mind,…, or even of voluntary starvation, those states approaching giddiness where the body, partly lightened of ballast, enters into a world for which it is not made, and which affords it a foretaste of the cold and emptiness of death.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Animula Vagula Blandula
“Probably both [the cynics and the moralists] fear their own demons, whether resisting or surrendering to them, and they oblige themselves to scorn their pleasure in order to reduce its almost terrifying power, which overwhelms them, and its strange mystery, wherein they feel lost.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Animula Vagula Blandula
“Of all our games, love’s play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul, and is also the only one in which the player has to abandon himself to the body’s ecstasy. To put reason aside is not indispensable for a drinker, but the lover who leaves reason in control does not follow his god until the end…I know no decision which a man makes for simpler or more inevitable reasons, where the object chosen is weighed more exactly for its balance of sheer pleasure, or where the seeker after truth has a better chance to judge the naked human being.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Animula Vagula Blandula
“Popular tradition has not been wrong in regarding love always as a form of initiation, one of the points of encounter of the secret with the sacred.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Animula Vagula Blandula
“The technique of a great seducer requires a facility and an indifference in passing from one object of affection to another which I could never have; however that may be, my loves have left me more often than I have left them, for I have never been able to understand how one could have enough of any beloved.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Animula Vagula Blandula
“What reassures us about sleep is that we do come out of it, and come out of it unchanged, since some mysterious ban keeps us from bringing back with us in their true form even the remnants of our dreams. What also reassures us is that sleep heals us of fatigue, but heals us by the most radical of means in arranging that we cease temporarily to exist. There, as elsewhere, the pleasure and the art consist in conscious surrender to that blissful unconsciousness, and in accepting to be slightly less strong, less light, less heavy and less definite than our waking selves.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Animula Vagula Blandula
“The man who cannot sleep,…refuses more or less to entrust himself to the flow of things.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Animula Vagula Blandula
“The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions…but more slowly, life has thrown light for me on the meaning of books.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Animula Vagula Blandula
“I have come to think that great men are characterized precisely by the extreme position which they take, and that their heroism consists in holding to that extremity throughout their lives. They are our poles, or our antipodes.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Animula Vagula Blandula
“Still, the mind of man is reluctant to consider itself as the product of chance…”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Animula Vagula Blandula
“A part of every life,…is spent in searching out the reasons for its existence, its starting point, and its source.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Animula Vagula Blandula
“When all the involved calculations prove false, and the philosophers themselves have nothing more to tell us, it is excusable to turn to the random twitter of birds, or toward the distant mechanisms of the stars.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Animula Vagula Blandula
“I am not sure that the discovery of love is neccesarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Varius Multiplex Multiformis
“The most benighted of men are not without some glimmerings of the divine…”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Varius Multiplex Multiformis
“Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those he has.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Varius Multiplex Multiformis
“A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists. If death does take him, he is probably unaware of the fact; it amounts to no more for him than a shock or spasm.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Varius Multiplex Multiformis
“Morals are matter of private agreement; decency is of public concern.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Tellus Stabilita
“I see an objection to every effort toward ameliorating man’s condition on earth, namely that mankind is perhaps not worthy of such exertion. But…so long as…the entire human race is not reduced to a single head destined for the axe, we shall have to bear with humanity, keeping it within bounds but utilizing it to the utmost; our interest…will be to serve it.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Tellus Stabilita
“But the weight of love, like that of an arm thrown tenderly across a chest, becomes little by little too heavy to bear.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Saeculum Aureum
“These subtle and complex forms of life, these civilziations comfortably installed in their refinements of ease and of art, the very freedom of mind to seek and to judge, all this depended on countless rare chances, upon conditions almost impossible to bring about, and none of which could be expected to endure.”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Disciplina Augusta
“Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die…”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Patientia
“Little soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body, now you will dwell below in pallid places, stark and bare; there you will abandon your play of yore. But one moment still, let us gaze together on these familiar shores, on these objects which doubtless we shall not see again….Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes…”—Marguérite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Patientia
“The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world.” —Marc Chagall
“Any artist who remains true to himself becomes a work of art.”—Leonard Cohen
“It’s the duty of art to ask questions, not to provide answers. And if you want a clearer answer, I’ll have to pass.” —Michael Haneke
“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that temains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.” —Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
“We love to watch bad people do awful things in fictions, though we would not like it if they did those things to us in real life. The energy that drives any fictional plot comes from the darker forces, whether they be external (opponents of the heroine or hero) or internal (components of their selves).” —Margaret Atwood, comment-interview with The New Yorker (16/5/13)
“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” —Ansel Adams
“Myself is thus and so, and will continue thus and so. And why fight it? My balance comes from instability.” —Saul Bellow, Herzog
"People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned." —Saul Bellow
“When trouble strikes, head to the library. You will either be able to solve the problem, or simply have something to read as the world crashes down around you.” —Lemony Snicket
“We lose things because we are flawed; because we are human; because we have things to lose.” —Kathryn Schulz, When Things Go Missing
“All this makes dying sound meaningful and sweet—and it is true that, if you are lucky, there is a seam of sweetness and meaning to be found within it, a vein of silver in a dark cave a thousand feet underground. Still, the cave is a cave.” —Kathryn Schulz, When Things Go Missing
“A wife holding her dead husband, without trepidation, without denial, without any possibility of being cared for in return, just for the chance to be tender toward him one last time: it was the purest act of love I’ve ever seen.”—Kathryn Schulz, When Things Go Missing
“I did not expect, of course, that along the way I would encounter my father again in his physical form. To the extent that I thought about it at all, I thought that through sheer motion I might be able to create a tunnel of emptiness, in myself or in the world, that would fill up with a sense of his presence—his voice, his humor, his warmth, the perfect familiarity of our relationship.”—Kathryn Schulz, When Things Go Missing
“…grief makes reckless cosmologists of us all…”—Kathryn Schulz, When Things Go Missing
“…my sense of loss suddenly revealed itself as terribly narrow. What I miss about my father, as much as anything, is life as it looked filtered through him, held up and considered against his inner lights. Yet the most important thing that vanished when he died is wholly unavailable to me: life as it looked to him, life as we all live it, from the inside out. All my memories can’t add up to a single moment of what it was like to be my father, and all my loss pales beside his own.”—Kathryn Schulz, When Things Go Missing
“When we are experiencing it, loss often feels like an anomaly, a disruption in the usual order of things. In fact, though, it is the usual order of things. Entropy, mortality, extinction: the entire plan of the universe consists of losing, and life amounts to a reverse savings account in which we are eventually robbed of everything. Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees and backs and memories, the childhood friend, the husband of fifty years, the father of forever, the keys to the house, the keys to the car, the keys to the kingdom, the kingdom itself: sooner or later, all of it drifts into the Valley of Lost Things.”—Kathryn Schulz, When Things Go Missing
“The smitten lovers who marvel every day at the miracle of having met each other are right; it is finding that is astonishing. You meet a stranger passing through your town and know within days you will marry her. You lose your job at fifty-five and shock yourself by finding a new calling ten years later. You have a thought and find the words. You face a crisis and find your courage.”—Kathryn Schulz, When Things Go Missing
“No matter what goes missing, the wallet or the father, the lessons are the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days.”—Kathryn Schulz, When Things Go Missing
“…our brief crossing is best spent attending to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, denouncing what we cannot abide, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep.”—Kathryn Schulz, When Things Go Missing
“The memoirist must have complete ownership of their own fate, to the extent that they can create the illusion of friendship with the reader. But their responsibility is actually more like that of the parent: They are highly visible, especially in their mistakes. Likewise the memoirist occupies an intensely subjective world, while creating a template for, or version of, living in which objectivity is everything. A parent can create a complex and instructive “self” for the child, and it can be distressing when the “real,” flawed self breaks through. The really good memoirist can incorporate these losses of control into the picture.” —Rachel Cusk, interview with The New York Times, 5/1/17
“I treat my books like I treat my shoes: The more I love them, the shoddier they become.” —Rachel Cusk, interview with The New York Times, 5/1/17
“For Theresa May, a book about the meaning and consequences of divorce: “Divorce for Dummies,” perhaps, or Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee’s “Second Chances.” For Donald Trump, I would prescribe either “Don Quixote” or Dante’s “Inferno”: Even if their moral escaped him, it would probably take him fully four years to finish either one.” —Rachel Cusk, interview with The New York Times, 5/1/17, hypothetically recommending books
“Sex, marriage, motherhood, work, domesticity: it is through living these things that the politics of being a woman are expressed, and I labor this point because it is important to understand that the individual nature of experience is at odds — or should reserve the right to be — with any public discourse.” —Rachel Cusk, interview with The Guardian, 20/2/12
“Silence is going to become a very powerful thing.” —Rachel Cusk, interview with Heidi Julavits, 6/3/17
“Fate is the fundamental engine of narrative, and women are particularly vulnerable to the fake security it promises…You would never consult the runes otherwise. That comes from a feminine lack of control with destiny and willful self-deception about what happiness actually is and what the good outcome actually is.” —Rachel Cusk, interview with Heidi Julavits, 6/3/17
“There’s a type of writer — and always has been — who claims not to know what’s going to happen in their own book. And they say, ‘I sit down and just let the characters take over.’ When I hear women say it now, I think, Well, be careful. These are dangerous times.” —Rachel Cusk, interview with Heidi Julavits, 6/3/17
“The only way you would ever, you can ever understand anything is through personal honesty. And if you are sufficiently honest with yourself, you will find every quality, every quality that is manifested outside yourself.” —Rachel Cusk, interview with Heidi Julavits, 6/3/17
“I’m not remotely interested in me as a subject. I’m interested in me as an object, and my honesty isn’t brave, because it’s not for me, it’s not about me. It’s just that I’m all I’ve got.” —Rachel Cusk, interview with Heidi Julavits, 6/3/17
“Wanting people to like you corrupts your writing.” —Rachel Cusk, interview with Judith Thurman, “World of Interiors”, 7-14/8/17
“There seems to be some problem about my identity. But no one can find it, because it’s not there—I have lost all interest in having a self. Being a person has always meant getting blamed for it.” —Rachel Cusk, interview with Judith Thurman, “World of Interiors”, 7-14/8/17
“I don’t want to live a writer’s life, so I’m unemployed most of the time. My process is very uncomfortable. The hardest stage is to overcome the fakery, and I can’t associate with people while I’m doing that. But the writing part is pure technique. It’s a performance, like getting on a stage, and before I start I have to have rehearsed everything I want to say, and to know what’s in my sentences.” —Rachel Cusk, interview with Judith Thurman, “World of Interiors”, 7-14/8/17
“Female honor is the burnish of having survived your experiences without being destroyed by them, and female glory has to do with moral integrity.” —Rachel Cusk, interview with Judith Thurman, “World of Interiors”, 7-14/8/17
“I’m very strong. The strongest thing about me is my honesty. Not that it has helped me to be better at living. I have used my strength for the purposes of destruction. But now I can use it to build something [marriage] that will last.” —Rachel Cusk, interview with Judith Thurman, “World of Interiors”, 7-14/8/17
“[Men] never seem quite so trammeled or devoured by domesticity…It may be the last laugh of patriarchy that men are better at being women than women are.” —Rachel Cusk; Making House: Notes on Domesticity, 31/8/16
“What do I understand by the term ‘female’? A false thing; a repository of the cosmetic . . . a world in which words such as suffering, self-control and endurance occur, but usually in reference to weight loss; a world steeped in its own mild, voluntary oppression, a world at whose fringes one may find intersections to the real: to particular kinds of unhappiness, or discrimination, or fear.” —Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work
“Birth is not merely that which divides women from men. It also divides women from themselves, so that a woman’s understanding of what it is to exist is profoundly changed.” —Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work
“Form is both safety and imprisonment, both protector and dissembler: form, in the end, conceals truth, just as the body conceals the cancer that will destroy it. Form is rigid, inviolable, devastatingly correct; that is its vulnerability. Form can be broken. It will tolerate variation but not transgression; it can be broken, but at what cost? If it is destroyed what can be put in its place? The only alternative to form is chaos.” —Rachel Cusk, Aftermath
“…among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious.” —Rachel Cusk, Outline
“So much is lost…in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don’t hold on to them the sea will take them too.” —Rachel Cusk, Outline
“…the disgust that exists indelibly between men and women and that you are always trying to purge with what you call frankness…”—Rachel Cusk, Outline
“If people were silent about the things that had happened to them, was something not being betrayed, even if only the version of themselves that had experienced them?” —Rachel Cusk, Outline
“Freedom is a home you leave once and can never go back to.” —Rachel Cusk, Outline
“I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible. One could make almost anything happen, if one tried hard enough, but the trying—it seemed to me—was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction they did not naturally want to go…. There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.” —Rachel Cusk, Outline
“…it seemed to me that most marriages worked in the same way that stories are said to do, through the suspension of disbelief…” —Rachel Cusk, Outline
“When I looked at [them], I saw a vision of what I no longer had: I saw something, in other words, that wasn’t there. Those people were living in their moment, and though I could see it I could no more return to that moment than I could walk across the water that separated us. And of those two ways of living—living in the moment and living outside it—which was the more real?” —Rachel Cusk, Outline
“Fate, he said, is only truth in its natural state. When you leave things to fate it can take a long time, he said, but its processes are accurate and inexorable.” —Rachel Cusk, Transit
“Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality; that is, against the claim on our thinking attention which all events and facts make by virtue of their existence. If we were responsive to this claim all the time, we would soon be exhausted…” —Hannah Arendt, Thinking
“A trial resembles a play in that both focus on the doer, not on the victim. A show trial, to be effective, needs even more urgently than an ordinary trial a limited and well-defined outline of what the doer did, and how. In the center of a trial can only be the one who did—in this respect, he is like the hero in the play—and if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.” —Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, The New Yorker, 16 Feb. 1963
“The chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed; it is always in danger of being maneuvered out of the world not only for a time but, potentially, forever. Facts and events are infinitely more fragile things than axioms, discoveries, theories—even the most wildly speculative ones—produced by the human mind; they occur in the field of the ever-changing affairs of men, in whose flux there is nothing more permanent than the admittedly relative permanence of the human mind’s structure. Once they are lost, no rational effort will ever bring them back.” —Hannah Arendt, Truth and Politics, The New Yorker, 25 Feb. 1967
“And of course we saw the sea, always the sea, with its many faces, glass-smooth and stone-rough, at certain times blithely open and at others tightly inscrutable, sometimes a weak blue so clear that you could see straight down to the sea urchins at the bottom, spiked and expectant-looking, like mines left over from some war whose causes and combatants no one remembers, and sometimes an impenetrable purple, the color of the wine that we refer to as red but the Greeks call black.” —Daniel Mendelsohn, A Father and Son’s Final Odyssey
“But historical memory can exist only when there is a clear line separating the present from the past. That’s when you can say ‘after the Holocaust,’ for example. But we don’t have that break — there is no past, only a continuous present. As long as that’s the case, we are talking about legacy rather than memory: the continuing legacy of an experience we so cavalierly relegated to the past.” —Irina Flige
“The journey of discovery begins not with new vistas but with having new eyes with which to behold them.” — Marcel Proust
“To release that fount of sorrow, that sense of the irreparable, those agonies which prepare the way of love there must be … the risk of an impossibility.” —Marcel Proust, À le recherche du temps perdu; Swann’s Way
“I suppose I never think about death as an other side. Life is what’s on the other side; life is what we can’t get back to, because death is actually what we’re experiencing right now. Death is with you all the time; you get deeper in it as you move towards it, but it’s not unfamiliar to you. It’s always been there, so what becomes unfamiliar to you when you pass away from the moment is really life.” —bell hooks
“…we see everyone around us but never ourselves. And yet nothing would appear without this void that is ourselves.” —Sheila Heti, on Transit and Outline by Rachel Cusk
"Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin." —George Herbert, Love
“What have I done … to be so unhappy, and yet not to be convinced that this unhappiness, which invests me like an atmosphere, is quite real or justified?” —Alfred Hayes, In Love
“And was this, we say, later, when it’s over, really us? But it’s impossible! How could that fool, that impossible actor, ever have been us? How could we have been that posturing clown? Who put that false laughter into our mouths? Who drew those insincere tears from our eyes? Who taught us all that artifice of suffering? We have been hiding all the time; the events, that once were so real, happened to other people, who resemble us, imitators using our name, registering in hotels we stayed at, declaiming verses we kept in private scrapbooks; but not us, surely not us, we wince thinking that it could ever have possibly been us.” —Alfred Hayes, In Love
“The people do not always say things out loud,
Nor write them down on paper.
The people often hold
Great thoughts in their deepest hearts” —Langston Hughes, Freedom’s Plow
“Love is like whiskey,
Like sweet red wine.
If you want to be happy
You got to love all the time.” —Langston Hughes, Lament on Love
χρόνος δίκαιον ἄνδρα δείκνυσιν μόνος: κακὸν δὲ κἂν ἐν ἡμέρᾳ γνοίης μιᾷ "Time alone reveals a just man but an evil man you can discern in a single day" -Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
“Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good” —William Wordsworth, Personal Talk
“There are in our existence spots of time
Which with distinct preeminence retain
A fructifying virtue, whence, depressed
By trivial occupations and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds—
Especially the imaginative power==
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
Such moments chiefly seem to have their date
In our first childhood.” —William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799), First Part (288-297)
“And I do not doubt
That in this later time, when storm and rain
Beat on my roof at midnight, or by day
When I am in the woods, unknown to me
The workings of my spirit thence are brought.” —William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799), First Part (369-374)
“The poet, gentle creature as he is,
Has like the lover his unruly times— His fits when he is neither sick nor well,
Though no distress be near him but his own
Unmanageable thoughts. The mind itself,
The meditative mind, best pleased perhaps
While she as duteous as the mother dove
Sits brooding, lives not always to that end,
But has less quiet instincts—goadings-on
That drive her as in trouble through the groves.
With me is now such passion, which I blame
No otherwise than as it lasts too long.” —William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Book I (145-156)
“The mind of man is framed even like the breath
And harmony of music; there is a dark
Invisible workmanship that reconciles
discordant elements, and makes them move
In one society.” —William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Book I (351-355)
“Dust that we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Invisible workmanship that reconciles
discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society.” —William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), Book I (340-344)
"The status of women remains in flux: sometimes, some of us are somebodies, people who can be heard; at other times, we are nobodies, silent and invisible." –Rebecca Solnit
“‘I have no intention of suicide at present,—but I confess it would be a comfort to me to hold in my possession that golden key to the chamber of perpetual rest—“ —Percy Bysshe Shelley, letter to E. Trelawny, 18 June 1822
“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.” —Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy
“There are things you’ll see in an original manuscript that even a microfilm or digitised surrogate cannot convey – drypoint glosses, erasures, sewing holes, underdrawing, changes of parchment, subtleties of colour, loss of leaves, patina of handling – even smell and touch and sound, which can transform knowledge and understanding of the text when its scribes made it and first readers saw it.” —Christopher de Hamel
“God dwells with those in America who feel geographically at home and spiritually in exile.” —William Sloane Coffin
“The Michauds had gotten up at five o'clock in the morning to have time to clean the apartment thoroughly before they left. Of course it was strange to take so much care over worthless things that would almost certainly vanish as soon as the first bombs fell on Paris. But, thought Mme Michaud, we do dress the dead who are going to rot in the ground, and make them look good. It's a last homage, an ultimate proof of love for what was dear to us. And this apartment was very dear to them. They had been living there for sixteen years. They could not take all their memories and keepsakes with them. Try as they might, the best would stay here within these poor walls.” –Irène Némirovsky, Suite française
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” —James Baldwin
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” —James Baldwin
“No one works better out of anguish at all; that’s an incredible literary conceit.” —James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78, The Paris Review, Issue 91, Spring 1984
"...For the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light. And I say to you, make friends for yourselves by unrighteous mammon, that when you fail, they may receive you into an everlasting home." --Luke 16:8-9
“Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away.” —1 Corinthians 13:4-8
“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.” Revelations 21:4
Before Sleep
[edit]I was in love with anatomy
the symmetry of my body
poised for flight,
the heights it would take
over parents, lovers, a keen
riding over truth and detail.
I thought growing up would be
this rising from everything
old and earthly,
not these faltering steps out the door
every day, then back again.
“Be a nuisance where it counts. Do your part to inform and stimulate the public to join your action. Be depressed, discouraged, and disappointed at failure & the disheartening effects of ignorance, greed, corruption and bad politics, but never give up.” —Marjory Stoneman Douglas
“The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.“ —Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.” —Arthur Schopenhauer
“Les temps sont durs pour les rêveurs [Times are hard for dreamers]” —Amélie (film)
“But when one does not complain, and when one wants to master oneself with a tyrant’s grip — one’s faculties rise in revolt — and one pays for outward calm with an almost unbearable inner struggle.” —Charlotte Brontë, letter to Constantin Héger, Jan. 1845
“One suffers in silence so long as one has the strength and when that strength fails one speaks without measuring one’s words much.” —Charlotte Brontë, letter to Constantin Héger, Jan. 1845
“Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive.” —Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners
“Unless the novelist has gone utterly out of his mind, his aim is still communication and communication suggests talking inside a community.” —Flannery O’Connor, The Regional Writer, 1963
Peter C. Baker
[edit]“There is a fine line—perhaps too fine or jagged to ever locate with total certainty—between appreciating an artist’s emotional bravery and rubbernecking at his pain.” —Peter C. Baker; In a Room, Listening to Phil Elverum Sing About His Wife’s Death, 6/9/17
“As to originality, all pretensions are ludicrous – there is 'nothing new under the sun’.” —George Gordon Byron, Baron Byron, Diary, 10/12/1813
"I hate things all fiction...there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric and pure invention is but the talent of a liar." --George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron
“…resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.” —Ursula Le Guin
“[America owes its] singular prosperity and growing strength . . . to the superiority of their women.” —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
“...for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” --George Eliot
“…being a liberal is the best thing on earth you can be. You are welcoming to everyone when you're a liberal. You do not have a small mind.” —Lauren Bacall
“I have no fear of death. Must be wonderful, like a long sleep.” —Katherine Hepburn
“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.” —Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVII
“Life is difficult…Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.” —M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
“But when the city’s being sacked
Preserve the shrines. Show gods respect.
Reverence for gods survives
Our individual mortal lives.”
—Seamus Heaney
"History says, don't hope...
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme." --Seamus Heaney
“Family law is the most difficult subject I think there is. It's horrible, human, terrible.” —Stephen Breyer
“In essence what is lost is not true connection but a sense of connectedness — the idea that we are all proximal in that sterile antechamber to life, that we could touch lives briefly if we so desired, even if we never, ever do.” —Talia Lavin, Notes on Leaving Facebook (26/3/18)
“I would rather a heart be a muscle filled with the stuff of life; I would rather feed my companions steaming garlic bread and borscht on winter nights than watch from a distance as their lives scroll by.” —Talia Lavin, Notes on Leaving Facebook (26/3/18)
“Personal unity, identity, and initiative are not primitive characteristics of psychological life. They are incomplete results acquired with difficulty after long work, and they remain very fragile.” --Pierre Janet
“Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “is this a potential friend for me?” but “is this character alive?” —Claire Messud, interview with Publishers Weekly (29/4/13)
“I’m not making light of the necessary—food, water, shelter, health, employment, companionship—without which we manifestly can’t survive. But what makes us human is our capacity for memory, for laughter, for passion, for grief and for joy.” —Claire Messud, The Time for Art is Now (22/3/18)
“Ours is a bleakly utilitarian era. Every act, it seems, must be overtly purposeful, its value measurable, or else we deem it dispensable, a waste of time. Between the demands of social media (and our constant sense of inadequacy in the face of the thousands, nay millions, whose lives appear—often falsely—more orderly, productive and impressive than our own) and the lessons disseminated by our culture and its so-called leaders (for example, that monetary wealth is the ultimate goal), we risk losing sight of what makes existence meaningful.” —Claire Messud, The Time for Art is Now (22/3/18)
“None of us needs a mansion or a fat bank account. None of us is made fundamentally happier by a private jet, a drawer full of diamonds, a television show, or a YouTube channel. Nor does watching others accumulate these things enhance our own lives. Capitalism hoodwinks us daily. The stuff we buy, thinking it will improve our lot, proves to be bullshit—as is made evident from overflowing donation boxes at the Goodwill. These are the products of a culture of greed and self-interest. They dull us to our society’s injustices and distract us from fighting against them.” —Claire Messud, The Time for Art is Now (22/3/18)
“They may remain unarticulated, never breaking the surface of our lives, and yet they prove communicable nonetheless. That’s what art can do; it’s why art matters.” —Claire Messud, The Time for Art is Now (22/3/18)
“We must struggle to change our institutions, but our resistance to the depravity and depletion of these times must go beyond that. It must also occur in our souls. We are animals, and we must not forget that we live in our bodies; but we are animals blessed with memory and language. Each of us can create unprecedented beauty. We can transmit, even if imperfectly, the contents of our imaginations. We can learn from what has come before, and from what surrounds us. We are not doomed.” —Claire Messud, The Time for Art is Now (22/3/18)
“Art has the power to alter our interior selves, and in so doing to inspire, exhilarate, provoke, connect, and rouse us. As we are changed, our souls are awakened to possibility—immeasurable, yes, and potentially infinite.” —Claire Messud, The Time for Art is Now (22/3/18)
“When a cat puts his paw on the head of a half eaten fish it is at once delicate and dainty and fierce and when he retracts his claws again he is most beautifully innocent like firearms in a shop window or a pin-cushion with no pins in it.” —Pati Hill, Cats, 1955
“A cat has hundreds of games inside his head and anything that casts a shadow or leaps across his path becomes his toy. He does not have to spend any time deciding what he likes or what is good for him and so he is never awkward.” —Pati Hill, Cats, 1955
“In fact you might say one of the best features of a cat is that it is in every way an animal. A baboon for example can never be really lovable because of the way he uses his fingers (but not his napkin) and even a dog is maddening when he understands a little yet misses the point. With a cat there can be no deception. A cat is just a cat from start to end and does not even trouble himself to find out which of you is master.” —Pati Hill, Cats, 1955
“A country house is not complete to my way of thinking without a few cats to sit on the gate and lie in the dahlias. It is like a room without cushions or ornaments. Functional but dreary.” —Pati Hill, Cats, 1955
“I am a wicked man... But do you know, gentlemen, what was the main point about my wickedness? The whole thing, precisely was, the greatest nastiness precisely lay in my being shamefully conscious every moment, even in moments of the greatest bile, that I was not only not a wicked man but was not even an embittered man, that I was simply frightening sparrows in vain, and pleasing myself with it.” --Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
“The telephone is the writer's devil, the dictionary his guardian angel.” —Octavio Paz, interview with The Paris Review (The Art of Poetry No. 42), Issue 119, Summer 1991
“Roses…appear delicate but have adapted to most climates. They can be made to bloom all through the year until winter. The more they are cut back, the faster they grow, and the stronger they are.” —Alexander Chee, The Rosary, How To Write An Autobiographical Novel: Essays by Alexander Chee
“You’d unfriend a lot of people if you knew them as intimately and unsparingly as a good novel would. But not the ones you actually love.” —Jonathan Franzen, comment-interview with The New Yorker (16/5/13)
"Great wits are sure to madness near alli'd;
And thin partitions do their bounds divide" —John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel
“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” —Edmund Burke, Speech to the Electors of Bristol, 3 Nov 1774
“You can’t wait for inspiration because it may never come.” —Erskine Caldwell, The Art of Fiction No. 62, The Paris Review, Issue 86, Winter 1982
“Many memories are dead ends. That’s why I throw away a thousand pages. If you haven’t thrown away a thousand, then you don’t have four hundred that are worth a shit. You have to edit ruthlessly.” —Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir No. 1, The Paris Review, Issue 191, Winter 2009
“Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along.” —David McCullough, The Art of Biography No. 2, The Paris Review, Issue 152, Fall 1999
“The chances of finding a new piece are fairly remote…but it’s more likely you see something that’s been around a long time that others haven’t seen. Sometimes it derives from your own nature, your own interests. More often, it’s just that nobody bothered to look closely enough.” —David McCullough, The Art of Biography No. 2, The Paris Review, Issue 152, Fall 1999
“The frame of the novel and of the world is anthropocentric. But if I have to choose between the universe without a frame and mankind with a frame, I would choose mankind.” —László Krasznahorkai, The Art of Fiction No. 240, The Paris Review, Issue 225, Summer 2018
“‘I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better if the Almighty has created us all as—well—as sort of plants. You know, firmly embedded in the soil. Then none of this rot about wars and boundaries would have come up in the first place.’” —Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, Reginald Cardinal
“‘One can’t be forever dwelling on what might have been. One should realise one has as good as most, perhaps better, and be grateful.’”—Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, Miss Kenton
“‘Don’t keep looking back all the time, you’re bound to get depressed...But it’s the same for all of us, see? We’ve all got to put our feet up at some point...you’ve got to keep looking forward.’”—Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, the footman
“‘You’ve got to enjoy yourself. The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.’”—Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, the footman
“What is the point in worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course of action one’s life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you or I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.”—Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, Stevens
“Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.”—James Salter
“I hate the first inexact, inadequate expression of things. The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.”—James Salter, The Art of Fiction No. 133, The Paris Review, Issue 127, Summer 1993
“Pure masculinity, which I have been exposed to a lot in life, is tedious and inadequate.” —James Salter, The Art of Fiction No. 133, The Paris Review, Issue 127, Summer 1993
“What is a drawback in childhood is an asset to a literary life. Not being fluent on one’s feet sends one to the page and a habit is born.” —Lorrie Moore, The Art of Fiction No. 167, The Paris Review, Issue 158, Spring-Summer 2001
“I believed the novel [Anagrams] to be a messy expression of that mysterious banality “the creative process”—not unlike life, I suppose. (Certainly, we’ve now seen that the human genome resembles a rather long, messy, ad hoc novel—a kind of monster anagram.)”—Lorrie Moore, The Art of Fiction No. 167, The Paris Review, Issue 158, Spring-Summer 2001
“A writer who thought a lot or articulately about the evolution of his or her own voice and work would be a little doomed, I think. For purposes of artistic sanity one should probably not be standing outside one’s own oeuvre looking in.” —Lorrie Moore, The Art of Fiction No. 167, The Paris Review, Issue 158, Spring-Summer 2001
“A story is a kind of biopsy of human life.” —Lorrie Moore, The Art of Fiction No. 167, The Paris Review, Issue 158, Spring-Summer 2001
“You don’t need to write a novel if you feel at home in the world.” —Andrea Barrett, The Art of Fiction No. 180, The Paris Review, Issue 168, Winter 2003
“The only real voice to listen to is the one that tells you where you should be going with your work.” —Hilton Als, The Art of the Essay No. 3, The Paris Review, Issue 225, Summer 2018
“The damage suffered by people I know and love is almost always based on the trauma of the only elder they had treating them badly or being interested only in their silence.” —Hilton Als, The Art of the Essay No. 3, The Paris Review, Issue 225, Summer 2018
“Our experiences are painful and sometimes annihilating, and if we have the strength to crawl out of and excavate that wreckage, we have to ask ourselves how to describe the truth of it.” —Hilton Als, The Art of the Essay No. 3, The Paris Review, Issue 225, Summer 2018
“I see fiction not as the construction of an alternate world but as what your imagination gives you from the real world.” —Hilton Als, The Art of the Essay No. 3, The Paris Review, Issue 225, Summer 2018
“‘I could not expect too much when I expected nothing at all’..which was the truth—for I never thought…that anyone whom I could love, would stoop to love me…” —Elizabeth Barrett Browning, letter to Robert Browning, 12 Dec 1845
“When women are chosen for wives, they are not chosen for companions…And this is the carrying out of love & marriage almost everywhere in the world—& this, the degrading of women by both.”—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, letter to Robert Browning, 12 Aug 1846
“The motor-car has restored the romance of travel.
Freeing us from the irritating compulsions and contacts of the railway, the bondage to fixed hours and the beaten track, the approach to each town through the area of ugliness and desolation created by the railway itself, it has given us back the wonder, the adventure and the novelty which enlivened the way of our posting grand-parents. Above all these recovered pleasures must be ranked the delight of taking a town unawares, stealing on it by back ways and unchronicled paths, and surprising in it some intimate aspect of past time, some silhouette hidden for half a century or more by the ugly mask of railway embankments and the glass and iron bulk of a huge station.” —Edith Wharton, A Motor-Flight Through France, I. Boulogne to Amiens, The Atlantic, December 1906
“It is always a loss to arrive in a strange town after dark, and miss those preliminary stages of acquaintance that are so much more likely to be interesting in towns than in people; but the deprivation is partly atoned for by the sense of adventure with which, next morning, one casts one’s self upon the unknown. There is no conjectural first impression to be modified, perhaps got rid of: one’s mind presents a blank page for the town to write its name on.” —Edith Wharton, A Motor-Flight Through France, I. Boulogne to Amiens, The Atlantic, December 1906
“The world will doubtless always divide itself into two orders of mind: that which sees in past expressions of faith, political, religious or intellectual, only the bonds cast off by the struggle for “more light”; and that which, while moved by the spectacle of the struggle, cherishes also every sign of those past limitations that were, after all, each in its turn, symbols of the same effort toward a clearer vision. To the former kind of mind the great Gothic cathedral will be chiefly interesting as a work of art and a page of history; and it is perhaps proof of the advantage of cultivating the other—the more complex—point of view, in which enfranchisement of thought exists in harmony with atavism of feeling, that it permits one to appreciate these archæological values to the full, yet subordinates them to the more impressive facts of which they are the immense and moving expression. To such minds, the rousing of the sense of reverence is the supreme gifts of these mighty records of mediæval life: reverence for the persistent, slow-moving, far-reaching forces that brought them forth.“—Edith Wharton, A Motor-Flight Through France, I. Boulogne to Amiens, The Atlantic, December 1906
“A great Gothic cathedral sums up so much of history, it has cost so much in faith and toil, in blood and folly and saintly abnegation, it has sheltered such a long succession of lives, given collective voice to so many inarticulate and contradictory cravings, seen so much that was sublime and terrible, or foolish, pitiful and grotesque, that it is like some mysteriously preserved ancestor of the human race, some Wandering Jew grown sedentary and throned in stony contemplation, before whom the fleeting generations come and go.”—Edith Wharton, A Motor-Flight Through France, I. Boulogne to Amiens, The Atlantic, December 1906
“But shall we not have gained greatly in our enjoyment of beauty, as well as in serenity of spirit, if, instead of saying “this is good art,” or “this is bad art,” we say “this is classic” and “that is Gothic”—this transcendental, that rational—using neither term as an epithet of opprobrium or restriction, but content, when we have performed the act of discrimination, to note what forms of expression each tendency has worked out for itself?” —Edith Wharton, A Motor-Flight Through France, II. Beauvais and Rouen, The Atlantic, December 1906
“One arrow of sunlight, I remember, transfixed for a second an unknown town on one of these slopes: a town of some consequence, with walls and towers that flashed far-off and mysterious across the cloudy plain. Who has not been tantalized in travelling, by the glimpse of such cities—unnamed, undiscoverable afterward by the minutest orientations of map and guide-book? Certainly, to the uninitiated, no hill-town is visible on that particularly level section of the map of France; yet there sloped the hill, there shone the town—not a moment’s mirage, but the companion of an hour’s travel, dominating the turns of our road, beckoning to us across the increasing miles, and causing me to vow, as we lost the last glimpse of its towers, that next year I would go back and make it give up its name.” —Edith Wharton, A Motor-Flight Through France, IV. The Loire and the Indre, The Atlantic, December 1906
“Only a pretty woman and a French ville d’eau can look really charming in morning dishabille; and the way in which Vichy accomplishes the feat would be a lesson to many pretty women.” —Edith Wharton, A Motor-Flight Through France, V. Nohant to Clermont, The Atlantic, December 1906
“O socii—neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum—
O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem.
[Friends and companions,
Have we not known hard hours before this?
My men, who have endured still greater dangers,
God will grant us an end to these as well. ]” —Virgil, Aeneid (I. 198-199) (trans. Robert FitzGerald)
“Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit.
[Some day, perhaps, remembering even this
Will be a pleasure.” —Virgil, Aeneid (I. 203) (trans. Robert FitzGerald)
“Durate, et vosmet rebus servate scundis.
[Endure,…and reserve yourselves for better fate]” —Virgil, Aeneid (I.207) (trans. John Dryden)
“Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
[…the world is a world of tears
and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.” —Virgil, Aeneid (I. 462) (trans. Robert Fagles)
“Fama volat. [Rumor flies]” —Virgil, Aeneid (III. 121) (trans. Robert Fagles)
“Facilis descensus Averno:
Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
Hoc opus, hic labor est.
[The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies. ]” —Virgil, Aeneid (VI. 126-129) (trans. John Dryden)
“Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.
[And they were holding out their hands with longing for the other side]” —Virgil, Aeneid (VI. 314) (trans. Olivia Thompson)
“Quisque suos patimur manis.
[Each of us bears his own hell]” —Virgil, Aeneid (VI. 743)
“Dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt,
Euryale, an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?
[Do the gods light this fire in our hearts
or does each man's mad desire become his god?” —Virgil, Aeneid (IX. 184-185) (trans. Robert Fagles)
“Audentes fortuna iuvat.
[Fortune favours the bold]” —Virgil, Aeneid (X. 284)
“Experto credite.
[Trust the expert]” —Virgil, Aeneid (XI. 283)
“Nulla salus bello.
[There is no salvation in war]” —Virgil, Aeneid (XI. 362) (trans. L. R. Lind)
“Forsan miseros meliora sequentur.
[…better times may come to those in pain]” —Virgil, Aeneid (XII. 153) (trans. Robert Fagles)
“Usque adeone mori miserum est?
[Is it then so sad a thing to die?]” —Virgil, Aeneid (XII. 646) (trans. Alexander Thomson)
“Animula vagula blandula
Hospes comesque corporis
Quae nunc abibis in loca
Pallidula rigida nudula
Nec ut soles dabis iocos
[Oh, loving Soul, my own so tenderly,
My life’s companion and my body’s guest,
To what new realms, poor flutterer, wilt thou fly?
Cheerless, disrobed, and cold in thy lone quest,
Hushed thy sweet fancies, mute thy wonted jest.]” —Hadrian (trans. D. Johnston)
“It seems I was fated to write, which is horrible. But I can only do one thing.” —Jean Rhys, The Art of Fiction No. 64, The Paris Review, Issue 76, Fall 1979
“A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That’s all any room is.” —Jean Rhys, The Art of Fiction No. 64, The Paris Review, Issue 76, Fall 1979
“I suppose one develops a number of personas and hides them away, then they pop up during writing. The exertion of control comes later.” —Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction No. 208, The Paris Review, Issue 195, Winter 2010
“[Chekhov] loved the singularity in people, the individuality. He took for granted the sense of family. He had the sense of fate overtaking a way of life, and his Russian humor seems to me kin to the humor of a Southerner. It’s the kind that lies mostly in character. You know, in Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, how people are always gathered together and talking and talking, no one’s really listening. Yet there’s a great love and understanding that prevails through it, and a knowledge and acceptance of each other’s idiosyncrasies, a tolerance of them, and also an acute enjoyment of the dramatic. Like in The Three Sisters, when the fire is going on, how they talk right on through their exhaustion, and Vershinin says, “I feel a strange excitement in the air,” and laughs and sings and talks about the future. That kind of responsiveness to the world, to whatever happens, out of their own deeps of character seems very southern to me.” —Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47, The Paris Review, Issue 55, Fall 1972
“When I read To the Lighthouse, I felt, Heavens, what is this? I was so excited by the experience I couldn’t sleep or eat. I’ve read it many times since, though more often these days I go back to her diary. Any day you open it to will be tragic, and yet all the marvelous things she says about her work, about working, leave you filled with joy that’s stronger than your misery for her. Remember—“I’m not very far along, but I think I have my statues against the sky”? Isn’t that beautiful?” —Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47, The Paris Review, Issue 55, Fall 1972
“At the time of writing, I don’t write for my friends or myself, either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it. I believe if I stopped to wonder what So-and-so would think, or what I’d feel like if this were read by a stranger, I would be paralyzed. I care what my friends think, very deeply—and it’s only after they’ve read the finished thing that I really can rest, deep down. But in the writing, I have to just keep going straight through with only the thing in mind and what it dictates.” —Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47, The Paris Review, Issue 55, Fall 1972
“It’s necessary, anyway, to trust that moment when you were sure at last you had done all you could, done your best for that time.” —Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47, The Paris Review, Issue 55, Fall 1972
“‘…no one knows his own begetting.’” —Homer, The Odyssey (trans. Emily Wilson) (1.216)
“Leaving the Ocean’s streams, the Sun leapt up
into the sky of bronze, to shine his light
for gods and mortals on the fertile earth.” —Homer, The Odyssey (trans. Emily Wilson) (3.1-3)
“‘But death is universal. Even gods
cannot protect the people that they love,
when fate and cruel death catch up with them.’” —Homer, The Odyssey (trans. Emily Wilson) (3.236-238)
“...Of all the creatures
that live and breathe and creep on earth, we humans
are weakest...” —Homer, The Odyssey (trans. Emily Wilson) (18.129-131)
“‘No one should turn away from what is right;
a man should quietly accept whatever the gods may give...’” —Homer, The Odyssey (trans. Emily Wilson) (18.141-143)
“‘Weapons themselves can tempt a man to fight.’” —Homer, The Odyssey (trans. Emily Wilson) (19.14)
“’dreams are confusing, and not all come true.
There are two gates of dreams: one pair is made
of horn and one of ivory. The dreams from ivory are full of
trickery; their stories turn out false. The ones that come
through polished horn come true. But my strange dream did not
come out that way, I think. I wish
it had…” —Homer, The Odyssey (trans. Emily Wilson) (19.564-571)
“This notion of suffering offers the illusion of control: if we believe that our pain is a form of punishment, then that pain isn’t meaningless. We can respond by atoning—with prayer, with sacrifice, with self-abasement. We can retain some sliver of agency.” —Elaine Pagels, Why Religion: A Personal Story
“In its beginning, dialogue’s the easiest thing in the world to write when you have a good ear, which I think I have. But as it goes on, it’s the most difficult, because it has so many ways to function.” —Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47, The Paris Review, Issue 55, Fall 1972
“An actual child may or may not fulfill parental fantasies.” —Susan Howe, Debths, Foreword
“Show me affection as a small nonunderstanding person.” —Susan Howe, Debths, Foreword
“Only art works are capable of transmitting cthonic echo-signals.” —Susan Howe, Debths, Foreword
“We have so little time in the distant present.” —Susan Howe, Debths, Foreword
“As life rushes by we do our best with the nerves we inherit.” —Susan Howe, Debths, Foreword
“Paper is stationary, unlike a wandering ghost it survives being rag or bark.” —Susan Howe, Debths, Foreword
“The soul appears or occurs as something we feel compelled to live into or to move toward as if it were there floating a little part and at an angle or” —Susan Howe, Debths, Foreword
“A work of art is a work of signs, at least to the poet’s nursery bookshelf sheltered behind the artist’s ear.” —Susan Howe, Debths, Titian Air Vent
“There are those of us at a distance who may have seemed to drop out of touch but never really did” —Susan Howe, Debths, Titian Air Vent
“A luminous aura surrounds all things noumenal.” —Susan Howe, Debths, Titian Air Vent
“If to sense you are
alive is pleasant itself
or can be nearly so—
If I knew what it is
I’d show it—but no
What I lack is myself” —Susan Howe, Debths, Periscope
““I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do.” —Gertrude Stein” —Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
“A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.” —Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.” —Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
“Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.” —Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
“Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between 'I love you' and 'I love you too,' the absent presence of desire comes alive."
—Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet
“We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality. We sleep in a long reproachful dust against ourselves. We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery. Life, the pastures in which the night feeds and prunes the cud that nourishes us to despair. Life, the permission to know death. We were created that the earth might be made sensible of her inhuman taste; and love that the body might be so dear that even the earth should roar with it.” —Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, Watchman, What of the Night?
“The more we know of a person, the less we know.” —Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, Where the Tree Falls
“So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight.” —Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, Go Down, Matthew
“The Maine coast was made for poetry, and I am never not bowled over by it.” —Jacquelyn Ardam, Real Toads at the International Cryptozoology Museum, LA Review of Books (17/7/2018)
“This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don't think about it at all.
The thing that was your bright treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.
This is what happens.
Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.” ― Alice Munro, Runaway
“…hers was the indefinable beauty that comes from joy, enthusiasm, success, and that is nothing more than a harmony of temperament and circumstances. Her desires, her sorrows, her experience of pleasure, and her ever-youthful illusions had had the same effect as manure, rain, wind, and sun on a flower, developing her by degrees, and she was at last blooming in the fullness of her nature.” —Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
“It’s all too easy to imagine that literary translation simply conveys the content of the original into a new language, as if tracing paper would do the job.” —Diane Rayor
“I’m drawn to gray, as to a dream, but not to any old gray. Not storm-cloud gray or corporate monolith. I prefer tranquil gray: the undyed wool of sheep in rain, the mood inside a Gerhard Richter painting, the mottle of an ancient cairn. I don’t mean any one gray either but the entire underrainbow of the world, the faded rose and sage and caesious. Liard, lovat, perse. The human eye perceives five hundred—not a mere fifty—shades of gray. Paul Klee called it the richest color, ‘the one that makes all the others speak.’” —Meghan Flaherty, “Ode to Gray,” The Paris Review Daily (August 21, 2018)
“Consumption is not a passion for substances but a passion for the code.” —Jean Baudrillard